Braving the elements for a rare glimpse of a full lunar eclipse seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ll just run outside and click off a few shots of the moon as the earth’s shadow passes over it. “It’s really not that cold,” and “There’s no wind so it’s not too bad,” were the lies I was telling myself. It wasn’t until I came back inside that I realized it was a balmy -2°F at the time.
I ended up setting up the tripod because my camera wanted to leave the shutter open for a long time to capture as much light as the night would offer. When you have long exposure times, any movement in the camera is going to blur the picture. Depending on the ISO setting, the exposure times were as long as 30 seconds. I had to come in when I couldn’t feel my fingers.
If you care, the photo below was shot at ISO 1600 with an exposure of 2 seconds and an aperture setting of F/5.6 at a focal length of 135mm. Clearly, I need a better zoom lens.
(click for photos for larger view)
Yeah, I heard. The next lunar eclipse won’t be visible until December 20, 2010. Great, another winter photo op.