2026 Blood Moon

photography astrophotography

We got a fully eclipsed moon for an hour here recently, so naturally I took my camera gear into a nearby forest (creepy) to get some nice pics.


Partial eclipse. Quite a wide dynamic range needed to capture both the light and dark in the same shot (the shadow is pitch black before the edit). partial_eclipse

I took a few wider shots while waiting for the moon to hurry up and hide behind earth. Nothing super spectacular but it was a nice spot to hang out. wide_partial_eclipse

Because I don't have a sky tracker and an eclipsed moon is quite dark I couldn't expose as well as I'd like (full moon is easy as you can do a fast shutter with base iso and a sharp aperture). My super telephoto (500mm) has garbage sharpness wide open (f/5.6) so I have to stop it down to f/8, which means I was pushing the ISO a bit (max exposure I could get away with before blur was 1/2"). Meanwhile my tele can only go to 200mm but is still super sharp at f/2.8 so it can actually capture more light from the same subject than the super tele (200 / 2.8 > 500 / 8), but I found the noise was low enough that the 500mm still delivered marginally better results after cropping. This is a ~200% crop (downsampled for web still). eclipse

The big pain with the 500mm f/5.6 was it couldn't autofocus with that little light so I had to manually focus (and the lens doesn't stop at infinity). I think I did a decent job but it was pretty tedious. Meanwhile the 200mm f/2.8 could still lock on instantly :|.

I still got some very nice shots with the 200mm. Here's one I managed to grab just as a load of clouds rolled in at peak eclipse. cloud_eclipse

That's all for this one. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in higher resolution shots, prints etc. or just want to chat.

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