A Lunar Eclipse In Between Summer Storms

From May until sometime in October, the chance of an afternoon or an evening thunderstorm is omnipresent on the Space Coast. Sometimes you get both — summer is the wet season here, and you have to factor that into any plan you make for the evening. Such was the case last night, with scattered thunderstorms firing up in the late afternoon and continuing until after midnight.

For some folks — like me — that was disappointing, the longest total lunar eclipse in many a year was happening in the skies above us, and depending on where one was located, you either got to see the whole celestial show, or very little of it. I had planned a series of photographs marking the beginning to end of the eclipse cycle, but storms and their clouds kyboshed that completely. So go the plans of mice and men, it is said.

Then, just as the last slivers of direct sunlight were being chased off Luna’s surface by the encroaching shadow of the Earth, the clouds parted, but the air remained humid and thick. Alas, serendipity!

Using extreme settings that were disadvantageous to good photography, in mediocre atmospheric conditions, this is what I saw.

Given the long exposure and extreme ISO, I can’t complain about this photo. Before digital cameras, 25,600 was an imaginary number for film speed. In digital, the high setting produces an severely high level of noise. Secondly, given that the moon is in orbit around the Earth at 1.03 km/s and for its part, the Earth is rotating at a speed of 460 meters per second–or roughly 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, one has a dynamic target that creates motion blur at low shutter speeds. Half a second of exposure time is far too long, as it is a virtual certainty to have motion blur in the resulting photograph.

In other words, it takes specialized equipment in capable hands to get tack-sharp photos for a dim subject that’s in motion across the sky.

I didn’t have the luxury of such equipment nor the benefit of much experience using it. So, I did the best I could given the circumstances, and I’m fairly happy with the way a few shots turned out. Perhaps I will acquire a sky tracker to rotate the camera to match the rotation of the earth for the November 2022 lunar eclipse.

Photography is as much a technical art as it is an aesthetic one, and anyone who is a serious hobbyist or professional is constantly learning and honing their skills. It’s an enjoyable journey, even if one encounters failures along the way, because the experience of taking the path to the final photo is more of a reward than the picture that ends up on the wall. For me, last night was such a night. I had a bit of fun and I got to see a relatively rare bit of celestial beauty. At the end of the day, that’s really all that matters.