Guide Supermoon Lunar Eclipse Tonight - 01:12 BST until 06:22 BST

100

 

My brother is mad, he's going out to a really dark spot away from city lights in a few hours to get a good shot of it, I'll copy 1 of his images if good & post it here, will be some time tomorrow because I'm not mad enough to stay up & go chase it.

 

Not mad I would have done the same if I never had work tomorrow. Here in the middle of brum is not really a good place to take pics of the sky at night

 

OK really keen I suppose is more accurate.

 

I'm going to take a wonder down to the harbours edge and see what i get there, It should 'outshine' the lights from Portsmouth. Will give me a chance to play with the remote shutter on my phone/tablet.

Sam

 

ISO 100, Nikon D3200 Sigma 55-200mm lens, f8, 1/200 - cropped, obviously....

 

Be careful if you're venturing out with your kit later. There are bound to be some scumbags who will see tonight as rich pickings.

 

My Jupiter 21M and I are ready for tonight.

UTC-5:00 between 9PM and 12:30AM

 

Good luck guys, I'm off to bed soon.

 

100% crop, taken with Sigmatel 135/1.8 at f/8 (I think), 1/250, ISO 200 on tripod.

Also tried it with a cheapo Komura 2x teleconverter but the results weren't great. I've also noticed that my SMC Takumar 200/4 unfortunately doesn't focus completely to infinity for some reason (maybe an adapter problem). Shame.

 

MOONPIC DOT COM!

Nice shots folks.

If anyone lives near Kronos, can you go and rattle some bins?

 

Cloud has temporarily stopped play if anyone is interested in a time line of events where I am

 

Bloody clouds : (

Update: Clouds out of the way, just in time.

 

Well there I was standing in the communal back garden in my pj's at 04:45 and what do I see in the sky?

Very little, a hazy quarter moon which when snapped appeared as little more than a white/grey smudge on a perfectly black background.

But this has piqued my interest though of course coming into winter being out in the early hours of a morning in a Scottish winter trying to get a decent shot of the moon does not bode well for my health.

My real issue is the inability to know or rather remember what I should do the settings should I want to try others due to my trouble remembering and learning new things which comes with Fibromyalgia but hey overall I love the pictures I do take which are mainly of my cat and compared to my former point and click there is no comparison. So I will keep plugging away and one day I will post an image of the moon. Just don't hold your breath waiting.

 

That's a pity, Kronos. I know you've heen struggling with your camera for a while and I was really hoping you'd get your shot.

Never mind, I hope this exercise has helped you gain some more understanding. I enjoyed it anyway.

 

Glenn, sorry to hear that you didn't have much success. Practicing first (given the notice...) on the moon earlier in the night helped me get the camera set up in the right ball park.
I slept through my alarm at 3 am, and woke up at 3.45 in a hurry.
Camera was downstairs ready to go, and just had to pop outside.

I missed it for starters, those new LED street lamps are ****ing bright when you come out from sleep in the dark, and the neighbour's porch light opposite didn't help...

Having looked round sleepily for a few moments, I spotted it and set the camera up on the tripod.



These are 2 longer exposures were close together in time at 70mm on Nikon 18-70 DX fitted to my D7000 at 800 ISO.





Sadly, I left my long lens [70-300] at work, so not as much detail as I'd have liked, good colour though.

Not brilliantly sharp either, I'm sure that the D7000 needs focus calibration on my lenses as there's just not the sharpness I'd expect.

Hope some of you mad guys were up and recording the event, I thought I'd have a go as 18 years is a while to wait for the next one!

 

Let me see I will be about 80 then so probably incontinent, so standing in the garden in the small hours on a cold night will probably be disastrous and what do you think the chances are that I still will not have grasped the basics of DSLR cameras by then.

 

Maybe technology will come to the rescue?

Your personal care droid with thought controlled supermega camera, will pop outside while you say warm indoors and do the necessary...

On a less frivolous note, I'm wondering how different the eclipse may have looked from up in Scotland, compared to the South Coast.

 

As I mentioned in a thread up here in Edinburgh we only got a quarter moon at 5am not the full frontal image though that may have come earlier. Either way i did not get it and I would not have been happy with the hazy quarter moon image anyway. And like you I had the camera set up on a tripod, remote connected just the moon did not play ball at that time. But I think I will have a go at an ordinary moon see if I can learn better from trial and error as book learning is a total waste of time these days.

 

I gave up by 2am, I took about 7 test photos in my back garden, which thanks to the moon being so high in the sky, i had little light pollution. Two things i noticed, First, i absolutely love having a Mirrorless camera, having set the camera up with the basic settings you guys had posted, i was able to just tweak the settings with an instant change in my live view, not needing to take any photo's. Secondly, and most importantly, 18-105mm isn't enough, I really could do with 200mm or more.


Moon Test by Sam Masters, on Flickr

Sam