November 8, 2003
Photographed with a 3-megapixel digital camera — telescope close-ups and composite wide-field shots over a one-hour period.
Through the telescope just before totality.
Composite through a 300mm lens over a 1-hour period.
Composite through a normal lens over a 1-hour period.
The full moon, two hours after the eclipse.
March 3, 2007
A cloudy, hazy evening — the animation below is a time-lapse covering approximately one hour. Reload the page to play it again.
Time-lapse animation — approximately one hour of the eclipse. (Reload page to replay.)
Emerging from totality.
August 28, 2007
Totality was just beginning as the moon was setting at sunrise — a race against the dawn, captured in seven frames between 5:05 and 5:46 a.m.
Multiple Exposure — Film Era
An early experiment with a film camera on a tripod, manually triggered every 7 minutes using a snooze alarm — 14 exposures representing 1 hour and 37 minutes of travel.
Click to view larger. Fourteen exposures on a single frame of film — 1 hour 37 minutes of the moon's journey.
I mounted the camera on a tripod with the shutter locked open and covered the lens with flat black cardboard. A snooze alarm rang every 7 minutes — each time I lifted the cardboard briefly, with shorter exposures when the moon was bright and longer ones as Earth's shadow darkened it.
There are fourteen exposures on this frame, representing the distance the moon traveled in 1 hour and 37 minutes. Unfortunately the film had been light-contaminated, producing the vertical streak in the center. Getting a good print was also extremely difficult given the contrast — on the negative I could see perfect circles with progressively larger bites taken out, but most prints came out overexposed.
A telephoto series taken at the same intervals was similarly disappointing — unlike a quarter moon where long shadows accentuate the craters, an eclipse casts no dramatic shadows, and the sequence looked like one washed-out moon photo followed by progressively duller ones. Here is an example.
