Total Lunar Eclipse September 27, 2015

Lunar Eclipse September 27, 2015.

The partly cloudy forecast and webcam images didn’t look all that promising in the Eastern Sierra yesterday afternoon, so I ditched my plans to pursue one of several compositions that I had worked out, and I stayed home to see if the moon would make any appearance at all. Here’s the story and some of my results from the event.

Total Lunar Eclipse September 27, 2015: wide angle time-lapse and 640mm effective live action footage from the total lunar eclipse last night.  The partly cloudy forecast and webcam images didn’t look all that promising in the Eastern Sierra yesterday afternoon, so I ditched my plans to pursue one of several compositions that I had worked out, and I stayed home to see if the moon would make any appearance at all.

I watched for about an hour after it was supposed to rise at 6:44, but there was no sign of it, so I left my camera shooting a sequence of images for a time-lapse video, and I went back inside.  A few minutes later, the fully eclipsed moon was visible through a break in the clouds, from 7:56 – 8:06.  I came back out a while later, but the moon was behind the clouds, so I didn’t know that it had made a brief appearance until I reviewed the images later!

As the moon was more than halfway through the partial, umbral phase coming out of total eclipse, it emerged from the clouds and starting lighting up the clouds and landscape with increasingly bright light.

As the face of the moon returned to fully lit in the penumbral phase of the eclipse, there was a nice halo of color around the moon, so I set up a second camera to capture that.  I used my Canon EOS 70D with the EF 70-200mm f/4 IS L Series lens and a 2X teleconverter, for an effective focal length of 640mm.  The clouds were moving pretty quickly, so I also captures dome live video of the clouds moving across the face of the moon.  I had the camera on a sky-tracking mount, so the moon remains essentially still in the frame.

I didn’t shoot where I expected or capture what I anticipated, but by being there to catch changes in the weather, I captured some interesting results.

#lunareclipse #bloodmoon #september #2015 #astronomy #astrophotography #nightphotography

 

Jeff Sullivan

Jeff Sullivan leads landscape photography workshops in national parks and public lands throughout California and the American West.

View Comments

Recent Posts

Photographic Composition: Conception and Fine Tuning

This was one of those "stop the car" moments. Snowy Telescope Peak had nice side…

10 months ago

Geminid Meteor Shower 2023

The Geminids are the most active meteor shower of the year, and in recent years…

12 months ago

When Is The Best Time To Visit Bodie State Historic Park?

I was asked this question earlier today, and the more I thought of it, the…

1 year ago

Death Valley Wildflowers, Rainfall and Super Blooms

So called "super bloom" years make it easy to find wildflowers in Death Valley, but…

2 years ago

Night and Landscape Photography Workshops 2022-2023

We've reached a major milestone on our workshop program: we celebrated completing ten years of…

2 years ago

Death Valley “Adventure Series” Trip March/April 2022

Spring 2022 is shaping up to be a very busy year in Death Valley, like…

3 years ago

This website uses cookies.