Eclipse on the Winter solstice

It was chilly but the perfect night to try and capture the total eclipse of the moon last week. On the night of December 21 I stayed up to digiscope the event. Using my Swarovski spottingscope and 20x60 eyepiece and a Leica DLUX-4 camera with a modified Leica digiscope adapter I got these shots.

The only difficult part was the moon was near vertical and my tripod wanted to tip over being so out of balance. Holding the tripod and shooting a burst of 3 shots at a time helped. I used shutter priority for the most part. It seemed my best results were with shutter speed between 1/160 and 1/180 and the exposure set at -1.5.

Here are the results. All times are mountain time. My only disappointment was not capturing the orange glow of the moon during the full eclipse. I guess I need to work on shutter speed and exposure settings.

Moon pre-eclipse at 9:42 PM 21 Dec



Moon at 12:28 AM 22 DEC



Moon at 12:24 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 12:48 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 12:54 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 1:03 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 01:17 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 01:27 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 01:43 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 01:46 AM 22 Dec



Moon at 01:50 AM 22 Dec