Photographing a Lunar Eclipse

 

A lunar eclipse is an easy event to watch and provides several photographic opportunities. It can also be seen and photographed under bright city lights although the experience of seeing the light change as the Full Moon is slowly eclipsed is much more evident from a dark location. Even if you can't be awake all the night for the whole eclipse, set your alarm to catch at least part of it and try a quick photo or two.

 

There are both telephoto and wide-angle approaches you can take to photographing a lunar eclipse. With a telephoto lens (say around 200mm+) you can get in close enough to clearly capture the changing partial phases of the eclipse and show some detail in both the eclipsed and sunlit parts of the moon. Because everthing in the sky is moving, you need to keep exposures with telephotos lenses quite short, around 1/2 second to prevent too much trailing. T

 

There is a huge change in brightness between the sunlit part of the Moon and the part inside Earth's shadow. The sunlit part is much the same as a normal Full Moon, requiring an exposure of around 1/500 second, f5.6, ISO100. The Moon inside the shadow requires exposures like the example above, around 1/2 second at f4 and ISO400 or higher. You can try a series of exposures between these two extremes and then merge them together using HDR techniques.

 

Another approach to photographing lunar eclipses is to use a wide-angle lens to create a composite image showing the Moon's position and changing shape and colour through the eclipse. The Moon will follow the same path that the sun takes during the day, so take note of that in the preceding days so you know how to frame your image before the eclipse starts. Of course you can also make use of focal lengths in between wide-angle and telephoto. Any interesting foreground in the city or the country can work well for this kind of image.