Lunar Eclipse

Frozen Fingers

Williamsburg was perfectly located to observe the January 20th total lunar eclipse. The entire event was visible in clear skies high above the horizon, but frigid temperature and strong wind made observing very uncomfortable.

I struggled with a tripod-mounted Nikon D40 camera over the course of two hours attempting to get a decent image. Adjusting camera settings by pushing tiny buttons with frozen fingers was frustrating. I must have taken more than 50 pictures, but only one of these had reasonable quality. This one good image is shown next. It's a 4-second exposure with a zoom lens set to 200mm. A few  background stars are visible, especially if you click on the image to enlarge it.

The next image is also a 4-second exposure, but the lens was zoomed out to 55mm.

During totality the following picture, underexposed at one second, shows the Moon's orange color.

During partial phases it was hard to simultaneously capture detail in both the lit and shadowed portions of the Moon. The next two images show this. In the first picture there is reasonable detail in the shadowed orange portion, but the lit portion is overexposed. In the second image the overexposure is less, but the shadowed portion is too dark.

The cold weather was brutal. Small camera buttons could not be operated with gloves, and my bare fingers became uselessly numb after only ten minutes in the cold. Consequently, I could spend only a few minutes outside before retreating indoors to warm up. Rinse and repeat for about two hours.