Picture of the Week – Eclipse of the Century

Last week I wanted to hint about this, but I didn’t want to jinx it by saying that I would get the shots and then fall asleep waiting. But I toughed it out and got shots of the 12-21-10 Lunar Eclipse. I’ve got the regular moon shot down pretty good, but the eclipse shot, that was something that was certainly a challenge. Little if any light to focus on, enough movement of the moon in long exposures to create blur and -20 degrees and deep snow to add just enough shake to the tripod with or without Mirror Lock Up to blur the shots that were at an ISO high enough to deal with the Moon moving. But as any photographer knows, gear and conditions are not limitations, but rather challenges to explore and exceed. I’m also happy that this set got picked up by the Twitter feeds for iNews800 and Westjet. It might have gone elsewhere as well, but judging by the stats, likely not. Finally, this is the first bit of astro photography I’ve done with the 7D and I can certainly say that I enjoy the extra cropping capacity (free zoom!) and the new flexibility of Aperture 3 to fine tune the RAW noise reduction (the 30D files don’t seem to offer as dramatic an effect). Ironically there, turning off the reduction helped more than I thought it would.