What a birthday present! Just before midnight last night, I went outside and was very disappointed to find the sky completely clouded over. I started to go to bed but then decided to wait until 1:30am when the eclipse was supposed to begin. Lo and behold, when I went out, now on my birthday, I found a beautiful clear sky filled with stars. I lugged my big lens outside and got ready to shoot the moon. (If you click on the photos, you can see larger ones.)
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| The eclipse creeping across the moon. |
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| Just about to go into total eclipse. |
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| Totally! |
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| It was beautiful with the stars of the Milky Way in the background. |
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| Just starting to emerge from the shadow. |
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By now it was after 4am. My fingers were numb from cold, so I went to bed. What a great birthday gift the heavens gave me.
Getting the photos wasn't easy. I used my Canon 5D and my big mother of a 500mm lens with a 1.4X extender giving me the equivalent of a 700mm lens. The lens and camera were on a sturdy Gitzo tripod with a Wimberly Sidekick mount on a Really Right Stuff ballhead. The moon was crossing the sky quite quickly (OK, I know it's the earth revolving) and every few minutes I had to adjust the whole rig to keep the moon in frame. My fingers were so cold and numb, I could barely feel the little buttons on the camera. Then, the camera suddenly went dead even though I had put a fully charged battery in it. I had a couple of freshly charged batteries in my coat pocket, but neither of them worked either. It was the cold! These lithium batteries don't like cold weather. Lucky for me, I had another battery in the house, so I ran and got it and resumed shooting. I put the other two batteries into my pants, right next to my skin. When the camera went dead again, I was able to use one of those warmed-up batteries.
