Lunar Eclipse

Well I didn't get the best exposure or shot possible but I did get these 2 pretty decent shots of the Lunar Eclipse on 2/20/08. I almost didn't bother trying as I had been home from work most of the week and wasn't feeling well. Then the news reporter said, "there won't be another full Lunar Eclipse for 2 years". I still wasn't going to bother then my wife says, "I wonder if we can see it from our back yard?" She steps out the door into the freezing cold temperatures and says, "Oh cool, it's orange! Kids come look." So of course I had to get up and check it out. My 30d is disassembled and I was in a hurry so I grabbed the trusty 10d and snapped these 2 shots. Well, it was a little more involved than that. I had to get my tripod and my fast lens and a cable release. As I said earlier I have been battling the flu all week and I wasn't at my best mentally. I put on my F/2.8 lens but didn't bother to look at the aperture to it was at f/4. At f/4 I was getting a shutter speed of 16 seconds. Instead of adjusting the aperture first I went straight to the ISO. This worked, but I would have preferred to be shooting at a lower ISO than 1600. The other critical error I made was to not use the full focal length of the lens. I shot these at 159mm when I could have been shooting at 200mm. Oh well, I guess I shouldn't get the flu, at least I got these shots. I shot both of these images with a Canon 10d, Manual mode 1600 ISO, 2 seconds, at F/4. I was using a 70-200mm lens at 159mm and the camera was tripod mounted at 10:16 p.m.

Photoman