Lunar Eclipse 5/15/03

previous slide show
2003.0504

Parent
Directory

next slide show
2003.0711.canoe.1

Lunar Eclipse 5/15/03

We had a total lunar eclipse on the night of May 15, 2003. It was a beautiful night in western Wisconsin, so I figured what the heck, I'd try taking some photos. I put my Olympus c2100uz digital camera on a tripod in the garage, and set the optical zoom to 10X and digital zoom to 2.7X (27X total). I set all controls to manual, with a focus at infinity, then experimented with a wide variety of shutter speeds, apertures, and ISO numbers.

The results are not quite as good as they looked on the little LCD screen on the camera, but still better than I thought they'd be! I'm sure you can find much crisper images elsewhere, but it was kind of fun to try doing it myself.

I started out shortly after 9:00 p.m., when the eclipse was beginning, and continued shooting at irregular intervals until some time after 11:00 p.m., just after it started to leave the total eclipse. I had planned on continuing to shoot, but a few clouds foiled my plan.