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Knowing about this several days in advance, I checked to make sure it would be clear. With a cold high settling south, it looked like it would be. As it got closer, the models kept streaming an area of cirrus clouds nw to se....and moving a thicker area in from the west with the approaching storm. Well the models did pretty darn good. During the day there was a patch of mid-level clouds streaming nw-se over us all day. It's really hard to tell in this image above, but it's just below the moon. It finally lifts ne as the storm moves east, but here come the cirrus clouds from the west with that. They were flat out moving. I guesstimated they'd be over me about the time the eclipse started. They were just south of me by the time it was all over, so I got really lucky. They just didn't want to advance ne past a certain point. In the above I'm on my way up to Murray Hill in western IA. It was so cold today that they cancelled school in most locations. That never happens here. It was -10 in the morning, with a stiff northerly wind. Windchill was down around -30. I'm not sure it even got above zero up here where I go to shoot this eclipse. Looking at some obs in the area it must have been right around zero the whole time I am up here, and there was a highly annoying easterly wind, adding to the brutal cold. It was supposed to be light, but out in the open up there, it was strong enough it was keeping my camera strap up in the air behind the camera.
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As you can tell by the first image on here, it's already after sunset and dark. This one above was taken at 6:47, about 45 minutes after sunset. That's the full moon obviously, with the stars shining a bit. My favorite thing about a total lunar eclipse is watching the sky go from this bright washed out look, with few stars visible, to complete blackness and bright stars as the moon gets eclipsed. At first you can see all your surroundings in the moon light(heck I could read writing on a piece of paper before it was eclipsed) then an hour later you can't see anything but the night sky.
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Since so many people will get the orange eclipsed moon in all its glory, often with big telescopes..and since I've already gotten it once...what I wanted to capture this time was the difference in the night sky throughout the eclipse. It will be useful to know the eclipse times here. It was to start getting eclipsed at 7:43 pm, be completely eclipsed starting at 9:01 and lasting till 9:51......then be back out completely by 11:09. So from 7:43 till 9:01 it'd slowly be getting darker out with the darkest lasting from 9:01 through 9:51...then reverse and get brighter out slowly from 9:51 till 11:09. Before it even starts at 7:43, the sun will have been down almost 2 hours. So the early pictures won't have really much of any effect of twilight, since it will be pretty much done and over with. This above image was taken at 7:02 well before the eclipse starts, an hour after the sun has set...with the bright full moon out of frame rising to the left. It was taken at 10mm, F4.5, 86 seconds with ISO of 200. Notice you don't see a ton of stars, even though it is dark out....thanks to the full moon.
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Taken at 7:24, notice the cirrus clouds just above the hill to the south. That's what I feared would be on me before the eclipse was done. So far it was right on schedule(really easy to time with a satellite loop and a ruler on one's monitor). But for whatever reason, it stopped advancing in that area and really wouldn't get any closer. If you look at the second image on here under the moon, you can see the clouds that were over me all day. They are the white line just below the moon and just above the horizon. They would not budge till the western storm system finally gave them a bit of a nudge before sunset. So the cloud cover was pretty interesting alone. Those get budged out of the way just in time, and the others stop short.
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Eclipse has begun. This was taken at 7:53, ten minutes into the eclipse. It's a near full sized crop from my 100-400mm, shot at F5.6, ISO 200, and shutter of 1/500th. This portion is easy to shoot since the shutter needs to be fast to not blow out the moon. It was handheld.
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Taken at 7:56 3 minutes after the one before. Not a huge change the in the sky yet, but it is starting to darken. I thought that was a shooting star in the upper left(I did see one later in the night), but I hear it was probably an iridium flare. I never saw it with my eyes because I was in my car trying to fix my froze fingers. The camera is mounted on a tripod just outside my door. Each time I'd take a shot I'd get out a bit to grab the camera. I would only take a couple at a time, then bring the camera in the car and warm it up. My full battery was showing low right away thanks to such cold. The display was working really slow too. Several times I took the battery out of the camera to warm it up. That probably did little since the rest of the camera was frozen anyway. Nothing beats taking photos for 4 hours in arctic air. And hell I was up and out early in the day shooting eagles along the river, or trying to. F4.5, 200 ISO, for 185 seconds. I'm about 50 miles north of Omaha, probably 20 or so north of Missouri Valley. So that's what those lights are to the south. You can see the three stars of Orion's belt towards the top in the middle. The view from the top of that hill is amazing, but um it'd be about impossible to shoot this from up there tonight. It was hard enough from my car. That view is the wrong way anyway. This area is rather remote...or at least isolated. The road it's off of is between Pisgah and Little Sioux Iowa, both two tiny towns. For about a 3 hour period I saw about 3 cars go by. Early on some truck pulls in the parking lot just before it starts. I thought maybe they were there to watch, till they pull in and face west. I was like, hmmmm, it's this cold out I know no one is dumb enough to stand outside and watch things. If they weren't here for the moon show, why on Earth would they be here. Their presence wasn't making me thrilled to keep getting out of my car to shoot, in the dark, along this rather desolate little highway...alone. I did anyway, but was hoping they'd leave before it was in totality, since at that point it'd be so dark out I wouldn't be able to see my surroundings like I now could. The running car noise makes it so you aren't going to hear much of anything either, as you stand next to it screwing with your camera. I lucked out and they left after about 5 minutes. No clue why they stopped there. This happened before it was eclipsed at all.
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8:08 now.
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8:12 now and the sky is now starting to change...29 minutes into the eclipse.
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8:26 now, with big changes happening to the sky darkness.....43 minutes into eclipse with 35 more minutes to go before totality and even bigger changes. F4.5, 400 ISO now, and 194 second shutter.
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8:36 now. It was getting a bit old changing back and forth from the 100-400 and the 10-22.
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8:44 now in the above. The moon in the image before it is still just left of this above frame. This was only 6 minutes after that image of the moon, so you can kind of just imagine it off to the left. F3.5, 400 ISO, 182 seconds. Foreground is getting harder and harder to show in the images now, since the moon is more and more covered by Earth's shadow.
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8:49 now. Moon is 12 minutes away from being in totality(completely blocked). The dynamic range from a sunlit moon to the shadow parts is huge, much too big for a camera. In the above you could see the left side of the moon, it was just much dimmer and orange now....with the right side being very bright relative to the rest. So you can use a slower shutter to get the shadow area to show, or a fast one like I did here to just not blow out the sunlit side of the moon.
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