There was a rare annular lunar eclipse Sunday. It was only partial in Colorado, but it was the first since 2003, from what I was able to glean from a NASA website. I had not really planned to take pictures, but at the last minutes decided to try something. This is mostly a story about how to be unprepared for an eclipse!
I set up my Canon EOS on a tripod on the roof with the idea of photographing the Grand Mesa as it got darker and darker.
Then I used a cardstock with a pinhole to project the image on a piece of paper taped to a swamp cooler on the roof. I used my little Sony Cybershot camera to photograph it.
But after a while, I realized A) the sky was not going to get that dark, B) I screwed up the manual exposure settings on my camera and lost most of the shots anyway, but mainly C) the Sony autofocus could not focus on the piece of paper, esp. at close range, so it was useless.
So I moved the Canon & tripod to take pictures of the image on the paper. I was literally burning daylight trying to get it into position. Then I had to hold the pinhole sheet with one hand and snap the pics with the other, so I couldn’t hold the pinhole perfectly still.
Not that it really mattered: the image was not that sharp. If I held the pinhole further away, the image got bigger, but also dimmer.
Then as the sun set, I realized it was being obscured by leaves from the neighbor’s trees. So I climbed off the roof and moved to a fence with no trees. The eclip se had passed the maximum by then.
I tried poking a smaller pinhole to see if it would produce a sharper image. It didn’t. It just seemed to be dimmer.
A better method would have been to use a piece of tin foil. The foil would give a sharper pinhole. Ideally, you use a long tube to block out as much side light as possible, but I hadn’t done that. Likewise, you could use a west facing window with the curtains drawn, allowing just the pinhole to peek through. I didn’t have a west facing window, though.
7:23 pm.
7: 26 pm.
7:30 pm.
7: 37 pm
7:42 pm
