Totality

[Lonnie Utah]

I woke up at 2:50 AM to catch Saturday's Lunar Eclipse. I sat in the cold for 3.5 hours watching the magic.  Totally worth it (no pun intended). Here are the results...

[luxborealis]

Wow - great shots. Love the sequence.

[Lonnie Utah]

Wow - great shots. Love the sequence.

Thx. It's a composite, and the most difficult/involved photoshop project I've ever undertaken. Basically, what I did was set up two my two cameras to shoot at 10 min intervals. I had 1 with a wide lens set up to track the position of the moon, and a second with a 70-200mm @ 200mm to capture a detailed image of the moon. I decided to do it that way to get the maximum detail out of the moon shot and to get the best exposure of the moon possible.

So, my base layer was the wide shot. I then imported the next time sequence wide shot, aligned the layers, and reduced the opacity to where I could see the position of the moon. I then opened the corresponding detailed moon pic, selected the moon. pasted it to the base image as a new layer, reduced the scale to match the base image and (manually) aligned it with the correct time sequence moon on the base image. Lather, rinse and repeat.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Well done, and worth the effort I'd say.

[NancyP]

Fabulous, and a lot of work. Alas, the weather was clear for once, but I live too far east to have caught the eclipse.

[Paulo Bizarro]

Very good work, thanks for sharing.

[Lonnie Utah]

Thanks again everyone.

If I had to do it over, I might have gone with a focal length on the "wide" lens with somewhere between 35mm and 50mm. Being the first time I'd shot one of these, I really didn't know how far across the sky the moon would travel so I erred on the side of having room to crop. I cropped the 2x3 ration aspect base file to 4x5 to eliminate a good portion of the sky and a significant portion of the foreground. I'm guessing the final equivalent field of view is somewhere between 24mm and 35mm (but it's hard to say because I trimmed off so much and changed aspect ratios).

[maddogmurph]

I've never done this type of sequence before.  It strikes me that I would take one shot, then continually shoot the moon and then just take those layers cut out the background and basically paste the moon onto my original image.  I guess my question is would that work?  What would I lose doing it in what I feel like might be a much simpler method...?

[Lonnie Utah]

I've never done this type of sequence before.  It strikes me that I would take one shot, then continually shoot the moon and then just take those layers cut out the background and basically paste the moon onto my original image.  I guess my question is would that work?  What would I lose doing it in what I feel like might be a much simpler method...?

That would work, but you wouldn't get the true path of the moon through the sky....