Decided to try and capture the eclipse tonight. here is my results. Can't remember the aperture. just turned the ring till the image look right. It was dark and no light. But if I had to guess it was around 5.6, shot with Pentax K-x with Sears 135mm f2.8, iso 1600, 1/6 sec exposure.

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[Ash]

Ethereal result.
A tighter crop showing the finer details of the moon would make this one exquisite.
Well done.

[Sailor]

Great job of catching the red look - it looks out of this world . . . . . . well, I guess, it is out of this world.

Jer

[sub5runner]

Wish I knew how to make a tighter crop. Whenever I do it seems like I loose a lot of detail.

[JeffJS]

Wish I knew how to make a tighter crop. Whenever I do it seems like I loose a lot of detail.

That's because you used a 135mm lens. To get a good Detail shot of the moon, you need 4 or 5 times that focal length, at least. Still though, you saw and captured something I couldn't (due to cloud cover). The first total eclipse of the moon on the winter solstice since the 1600s (so I heard on the news). They also said that would be the last Total one on the winter solstice until 2029. Somehow, I'm not counting on seeing that one either.

December 2010 lunar eclipse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[RobG]

Wish I knew how to make a tighter crop. Whenever I do it seems like I loose a lot of detail.

You're probably seeing reality. The moon is relatively small in the image, so there's proportionally less pixels involved. The larger you make it, the more obvious the lack of pixels will be. If you crop to half of the original image area then resize for the web, you ought to increase the apparent size of the moon and still have plenty of pixels to work with. But if you went to 1:1 of the pixels and crop that, it's not likely to look very good.

To get the moon to a reasonable size in the viewfinder I had to use a 500mm lens and even then it was less than 25% of the horizontal pixels. With a 135mm lens the moon is probably only occupying 7% of the pixels.

[sub5runner]

Thanks for the info. That was the longest lens I had. haven't invested in a longer one yet. I'll give your suggestions a shot and see what I can come up with. But overall I'm happy with what I was ale to get with a $10 tripod and sitting on top of the roof.

[RobG]

Thanks for the info. That was the longest lens I had. haven't invested in a longer one yet. I'll give your suggestions a shot and see what I can come up with. But overall I'm happy with what I was ale to get with a $10 tripod and sitting on top of the roof.

And I think you should be pleased! When you try to photograph things like the moon, you discover that it isn't as big as your brain thinks it is.

[zgrdrtyl]

Great job..

[Tommot1965]

thats a nice image mate..a tight crop would have better..but what I like, is that you have captured a few stars too..makes it look quite star wars like...nice

[JeffJS]

Thanks for the info. That was the longest lens I had. haven't invested in a longer one yet. I'll give your suggestions a shot and see what I can come up with. But overall I'm happy with what I was ale to get with a $10 tripod and sitting on top of the roof.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking your photos. If you got on the Roof to get them, you went further than I ever would, even if I Could see the moon ..

One lens you may want to look into for this type of stuff (on the inexpensive budget) is a Spiratone Pluracoat Sharpshooter (400mm f6.3). It's a T mount adapter type lens and can be used on any camera. I question the Sharpshooter claim but it's decent for the typical price.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2366/1768779467_6bab7e8cfa_o.jpg

[sub5runner]

Finally managed to get some crops. Here is what I was able to come up with.

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