Not Another Moon Post??!!

Yup, sorry, another moon post. There will be a lot of these this week! With the lunar eclipse and the so-called "blood moon", who can resist? However, I failed miserably at capturing it with my camera. Here was my plan: Set up the camera, tripod and 400mm lens on a timer just before the scheduled lunar eclipse and take a series of shots. I figured setting the timer for every 30 minutes would give me a series of 6 or 8 good moon shots as the moon moved across the sky and the eclipse did its thing. I set things up around 11:30 PM in my back yard, made sure the moon was in the far lower left of my viewfinder (knowing the moon would be moving up and to the right), set the timer, and went off to bed.

Two really big flaws with this plan (can you guess what they are?). 1] The moon moves quickly, and in 30 minutes, it was totally out of the field of view. All of my photos were black frames! It moved up and to the right... but at a much faster rate than I realized!! 2] The lunar eclipse was really significant with regard to blocking out the moonlight (it's with difficulty I admit this didn't cross my mind ahead of time!). The exposure changed so dramatically that, even if the moon had stayed in my viewfinder, it would have been much to dim to register. Live and learn, right? 

What to do? Try it again! The next night (4/15/2014) was a full moon with a moonrise scheduled for about 8 PM. No eclipse, so exposure won't change. Instead of 30 minute intervals between shots (which was way too long), let's try 5 minutes. Here's a shot with the 400mm lens and cropped to make it look really big. What a beauty!

OK, that's more like it. Shooting at 5 minute intervals with a 200mm lens, I was able to capture about 7.5 moon shots before it disappeared off my viewfinder. 

Thanks for stopping by, and hope you enjoyed my trial and error moon series. Linking with Skywatch Friday. Click on the link to check out great skies (and some excellent blood moon shots) from around the world!