Photographing Tonight's Lunar Eclipse

Here’s the time of the eclipse:

http://www.shadowandsubstance.com/

Thanks Thorne. I pulled my old Russian 1,000 mm lens out of it’s last resting place,(well it was useful as an extra jack for supporting the car), but sadly it looks like cloud cover will be a problem here in the UK tonight.
I’ll keep an eye out anyway and good luck to fellow LS’ers for a sparkling clear view tonight!!

Russian 1,000mm? Where’d you get it? What’s it mount on?

Just our luck John, I can’t see my hand in front of my face today. Ok I am exaggerating, but it is cloudy. :)

Story of my life Wade !! Maybe there will be a gap in the clouds for one hour tonight-hehe.
That 1,000mm is an old MTO mirror lens, Bill. It’s got a Nikon mount on it and is surprisingly sharp for an old f10 fixed aperture piece of Russian glass. I’d like to pretend that I removed it from an old burnt out Russian tank in Afghanistan-truth is I bought it for around $60 off e-bay,(they are pretty rare to find these days).
It’s 1500mm equivalent on the DSLR of course-just the job for photographing the moon.

See this LS thread, too…
http://www.lightstalkers.org/lunar-eclipse-ansel-adams-birthday

John, That is fricking cool, man. I want one.

Don’t get too excited Bill-I’ve only used mine a few times as it is pretty near unusable for anything moving in murky weather,(so read most of the time in the UK). http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography-search-results.asp?qt=A6PTDC&ns=1&lic=6&lic=1 is one of the few images I’ve made using ‘the monster’.
(Amusingly you can see we also have a Gotham here in the UK-no sign of Batman though !! )
I’m not sure if all those old russian lenses would be as sharp-maybe I just got lucky with mine. The old lenses I used to use with my Zenit camera when I was a teenager were fairly crap as far as I remember!!

Sadly, the old MTO 1,000 didn’t get a look in at 3 a.m. Way too much cloud cover here in this part of the UK.
At least I got to re-discover my $60 lens though and I’ll be thinking up some projects to use it on !!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lunar_eclipse_February_21%2C_2008%2C_Millersville%2C_PA.jpg shows what I missed out on.

I got a couple, but didn’t do as well as I wanted without a tripod. The weather here was perfect up until about 10:15, when it suddenly clouded over completely (and man, it was cold). The paper here used a shot taken with a rig on a telescope….

http://www.imageevent.com/j_andrew/lunareclipse08

I never knew how slow a lunar eclipse was.. not to mention how very, very cold.

Here it is from Brooklyn.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcoatslovesyou/2281087954/

Nice capture, Matt.

How cold was it up there? It was 17 here, windchill about 4 (F, for all those non-US folks ;) ) I thought I’d be like the kid in “Christmas Story, stuck to my monopod….

I guess it was nearly tropical compared to those temps! 30f – 21f wind chill =)

I prefer last night’s weather to tonights – we have a lovely freezing rain going on…getting hammered. School was let out early. Last tiem we had a storm like this, there were huge areas of the city that didn’t have power for a month. While the ice made for some incredible images, I hope it doesn’t happen again….