Friday, October 10, 2014

Getting The Shot - An Eclipsing Story


The day before the lunar eclipse, I wrote down the altitude/azimuth for various times at the moon rise the night prior and for the beginning and full obscuration of the eclipse for my south Florida location.
The moon rise time came and I set out to scout my observation site, and check how my iPhone compass and clinometer worked to estimate where the moon would be during its "bloody" descent.
Not only were the clouds totally hiding the moon rise in the east, but the full eclipse was to occur only 4 degrees above the western palm tree littered horizon.  I had chosen a viewing site in the middle of a golf course with a nice lake extending almost to the horizon, and was imagining a phenomenal mirror shot of the giant full moon.  With the moon totally hidden, and the compass reading varying from north-east to south-east when pointing at where I remembered seeing the moon rise on other nights, I was starting to question if this whole adventure was really ridiculous - Florida for astronomy?
Late that night, I headed to bed. Perhaps my trusty Panasonic Lumix FZ200 would get some use in the morning.  I had mounted the camera to my tripod, and attached an Oly TCON-17, packed some cookies and gathered a folding chair.  I was ready.
The alarm went off at 04:45 and I ran to a west facing window.  Sure enough, high and bright in a crystal clear sky, I could see the moon.  I prepared my breakfast and reviewed the plan:  shoot with and without the teleconverter, keep the ISO at 200 or below, various f/stop from wide open to f/5.6, try +/- 1,2,3 bracketing, stabilization off, shoot raw, with two second timer, some shots at full tele/max resolution (12MP,24x), some at 48x, tiniest spot metering, and try AFS and manual focus.
I loaded my backpack and folding chair to my back, shouldered the tripod-ed camera, and set out to walk to my observation point.  In the darkness, I heard heavy footsteps approaching behind me.  Unimaginable to me that someone was jogging at 5:30 in the morning, and with such energy.  As a night owl, I have to be reminded periodically that some people get up that early every day.  There were dog walkers, and several exercise walkers.  It felt a little awkward being out with my camera and backpack.
I had timed my setup with the start of obscuration and started shooting immediately when I arrived.  I forgot completely about the plan to sit for the 90 minute shoot.  The moon was up about 20 degrees above the horizon, and above the cloud layer waiting at the horizon.  It was really beaming, and even with -2EV I was getting 500th of a second exposure.  This seemed good since I knew the moon was moving in the sky and even on the tripod, it is recommended to shoot around 1/(600x1.7).
I checked my first shots and realized that AFS was not getting a reliable focus.  I switched to manual focus but was having difficulty peaking the focus.  I had expected that setting the focus at infinity would be optimal, but the best focus was actually quite far from infinity.
Using the AES lock I varied the metering spot on different shots from in the dark obscuration area, to on the terminator, and to various features in the illuminated area.
By the time I would get my next shot dialed in, the moon usually had fallen partially out of the frame so I spent a lot of time playing with the tripod.  It isn't a cheap tripod, but not a great model either.
As the eclipse progressed to nearly half coverage, the moon had was starting to descend into the first of the clouds.  Surprisingly, I was able to continue shooting but the exposure times started to get worrisome.  The moon was really racing along.
As the time for totality approached, the moon was down to 4 degrees above the horizon and really deep into the cloud layer.  The exposure meter was predicting 8 second exposures, so I decided to raise the ISO to 320, open the lens to f/2.8, and resign myself to missing "the big moment".  Indeed the long exposure has motion artifacts from the earth/moon procession so that no amount of sharpening and definition sliders can bring the crisp, red, full moon to satisfaction.
Before I could even dial in another shot, the moon was gone.  I couldn't try the magnificent mirror masterpiece I had envisioned.  The 90 minute shoot was a blur in my mind as I packed my gear.
I don't have a way to remove the chromatic aberration of the TCON since I use iPhoto for my processing.  (Never did get comfortable enough with SilkyPix.)  I processed most of the shots with full highlight recovery, full highlight darkening, around 50% increased definition and about 25% sharpening.
The 12 "keepers" were up on Flicker, now lost to the bit bucket.