Well, it’s no secret that we had a lunar eclipse the other night. Alaska was just on the edge of the full eclipse zone, and the skies were crystal clear; we were in for a great show! It did not disappoint, the transition of the moon from silver to red was spectacular!

I took my equipment out to Murphy Dome.  It was also one of the hardest shoots that I’ve done for time lapsing because the moon moves very quickly! In 10 seconds it would shift a noticeable amount in-frame, making it exceptionally hard to timelapse. Secondly, the transition from a very bright moon to a dark one was difficult to work with. In order to control the highlights of the moon, I had to sacrifice the dark part and to get the reds I had to blow out the highlighted, white part. Third, I was shooting at 300 mm, and the longer exposures were getting jostled in the wind. I spent some of the night huddled on the upwind side of the camera to protect it. With all that said, I’m not complaining one bit, I had a great night out 🙂

So, the video I’ve compiled here is from the phase transitioning to dark. I had to go in post-shot and crop each to match as closely as possible. I developed a technique of centering my cropping grid on a crater to get it as close as possible. A bit time consuming, but I find image editing kind of therapeutic. Still, there is a small waggle of the moon- I hope you don’t mind :).