I am calling this the Miracle. 
Many of you will recall back in November as the Lunar Eclipse was going to happen that the weather turned ugly and got cloudy so you couldn't go capture it. I was fortunate that I had found an area in Colorado about 3 hours from my daughters that was showing clear skies all night long. The old mining town of Fairplay. So off I went.
As I was driving there, I noticed lot's of clouds, as I was scouting around the town and surrounding area to find a place to set up, sunset was fast approaching, and there was still a lot of clouds. And I was saying uh oh to myself, the weathermen really blew this one. So I captured a pretty colorful sunset thanks to the clouds, went back to a large country park in the town and set up my gear, only to find that I had left my Astro tripod behind. I had planned on using my Astro mount to guide on the moon the whole night. So that left me with Plan B, which meant that I would have to manually keep moving the camera on the tripod to keep the moon as centered as possible. Not ideal, but doable.
After the moon made a quick showing between some clouds right at sunset, it became firmly hidden. I thought about just packing it up, but decided I was already there, so I would see if I got lucky and the clouds would clear away. Later a few hours later, the miracles started pouring in. The clouds evaporated, and the moon showed itself. This was closer to midnight if I recall, and it was about an hour until the first phase of the eclipse was to begin. So I aligned the camera on the moon and started taking some photos, while moving the camera about every 5 minutes to recenter the moon. Also during this time a police officer came by to see what I was doing as she was checking on the park, and thankfully didn't kick me out, but allowed me to keep shooting, and she stopped by a couple of times during the night to make sure I was okay, and had even given me her card in case I had problems I could call her.
So the next couple of hours I spent constantly moving the camera. I had the camera in Aperture Priority. I switched the exposure metering to centerwighted, and turned on Auto ISO. I wanted the camera to manage the exposure as once the eclipse begins I know from past experience the brightness of it changes a lot, and I didn't want exposures that showed jerky steps of being bright, then all of a sudden getting darker and then going back to being too bright as by my eye, there would be no way I could manually control the exposure in small graduating steps. The exposures would change too much before I could perceive those changes by eye. So that, worked perfectly, and kept the exposures well under 1 second, so there was no movement of the moon in the scenes. Having the Auto ISO was key to this too.
Then during the eclipse itself, which lasted quite a lot longer then the timelapse shows, but I think it would be boring in a timelapse to just see the moon being the orange red and no real changes to it for 2 minutes in the timelapse. And during that time, the moon disappeared as the thin high level clouds moved back in. And then I couldn't see it visually to even try and track it, plus there was nothing left to see.
About a half hour later of watching the moon, I started to see an area of the clouds starting to brighten up a bit. It was the moon! It was calling out to me, and trying to show me where it was! As the moon was coming out of the eclipse, it was getting brighter, and it was able to start burning it's way through the clouds. Once I could see it, I recomposed the camera on it, and started the game of following it with the camera and taking photos continually. Then after about 15 or 20 minutes, the moon dipped under the clouds, and I had a perfect view of the moon until it set below the horizon.
I will mention it had gotten down into the teens that night. So I ended up having to put on my long thermals, and then on top of that I put insulated snow pants, and I had my normal jacket on, and then put my winter jacket on top of that. I got out a few heating pads to put into my gloves. It's not hard to stay warm if you are moving around, but having to stand and/or squat mext to a camera for 4 or 5 hours in the dead of the night, there is no muscle movement to help generate heat. So I am glad I had thrown all of my winter gear into my 4Runner before heading out. Of course if only I had remembered to throw the Astro tripod in the back also, I wouldn't have had to stand next to the camera all night long....
I wonder how many chapters this story will turn into....
Well, I should wrap it up. But all of what I wrote was just a prelude to the amount of time it took to do this project. I spent roughly 30 hours processing this. The exposure and converting part was simple because I had shot in Aperture Priority with Auto ISO. The exposure was pretty well nailed all night long. But because I had to track it all night long manually, and also with the manual tracking the camera wasn't rotating along with the moon, I now had to both manually move each shot to line them up with each other in terms of centering them back in the frame, but also the rotation of the moon in the frame.
My first pass through took close to 10 hours. I started in the front with the first moon image and just keep aligning and rotating, it was a very tedious effort. I had tried to load them all in a stack and let Photoshop align them, but that didn't work at all. So I had no choice but to manually do it. Well, I got through the Pre-Eclipse stage fine, I went into the Eclipse stage, and aligned them all fine, but when I got to the Post Eclipse part and the moon was coming out of the clouds, I realized I had moved the moon enough with my rotations, that if I continued the clouds would be sitting at a 45 degree angle.... Until there were clouds, there was no way for me to really keep an eye on what was what.... ugh... So I realized I needed to start from the back where I could keep the clouds level and then work in reverse...
I needed to take a few days off before starting that over again, and in the process I am busy with the grandkids and then driving back out to California for Thanksgiving.
5 or 6 days ago I picked it back up and finished it, again a bunch of hours later, I had them lined up, and back into individual images that I then could pull into Movavi for creating the timelapse.
So, I will admit it isn't perfect. Perhaps if I hadn't pulled back the curtain so much, for some of you, you might not even realize there was issues, though I know many of you are eagle eyed (you know who you are) and even without an explanation will see some of my struggles.
I had looked at some other peoples timelapses on the Lunar Eclipse on YouTube, and a lot of them were really poorly done, with the exposure jumping all over as the person was manually changing the exposure every 15 or 20 minutes during the night, etc... So I hate to grade my efforts using a curve scale, but I think my end result was pretty good compared to a lot of what I saw people had done. It will be 3 more years before the next Lunar Eclipse, and you can bet your last dollar, that I won't be forgetting any tripods when that occurs!
Thanks, and I hope timelapse is enjoyed.
As usual, if you haven't Subscribed to my YouTube Channel, please do. Help me get to 500 Subscribers.
Jim
Many of you will recall back in November as the Lunar Eclipse was going to happen that the weather turned ugly and got cloudy so you couldn't go capture it. I was fortunate that I had found an area in Colorado about 3 hours from my daughters that was showing clear skies all night long. The old mining town of Fairplay. So off I went.
As I was driving there, I noticed lot's of clouds, as I was scouting around the town and surrounding area to find a place to set up, sunset was fast approaching, and there was still a lot of clouds. And I was saying uh oh to myself, the weathermen really blew this one. So I captured a pretty colorful sunset thanks to the clouds, went back to a large country park in the town and set up my gear, only to find that I had left my Astro tripod behind. I had planned on using my Astro mount to guide on the moon the whole night. So that left me with Plan B, which meant that I would have to manually keep moving the camera on the tripod to keep the moon as centered as possible. Not ideal, but doable.
After the moon made a quick showing between some clouds right at sunset, it became firmly hidden. I thought about just packing it up, but decided I was already there, so I would see if I got lucky and the clouds would clear away. Later a few hours later, the miracles started pouring in. The clouds evaporated, and the moon showed itself. This was closer to midnight if I recall, and it was about an hour until the first phase of the eclipse was to begin. So I aligned the camera on the moon and started taking some photos, while moving the camera about every 5 minutes to recenter the moon. Also during this time a police officer came by to see what I was doing as she was checking on the park, and thankfully didn't kick me out, but allowed me to keep shooting, and she stopped by a couple of times during the night to make sure I was okay, and had even given me her card in case I had problems I could call her.
So the next couple of hours I spent constantly moving the camera. I had the camera in Aperture Priority. I switched the exposure metering to centerwighted, and turned on Auto ISO. I wanted the camera to manage the exposure as once the eclipse begins I know from past experience the brightness of it changes a lot, and I didn't want exposures that showed jerky steps of being bright, then all of a sudden getting darker and then going back to being too bright as by my eye, there would be no way I could manually control the exposure in small graduating steps. The exposures would change too much before I could perceive those changes by eye. So that, worked perfectly, and kept the exposures well under 1 second, so there was no movement of the moon in the scenes. Having the Auto ISO was key to this too.
Then during the eclipse itself, which lasted quite a lot longer then the timelapse shows, but I think it would be boring in a timelapse to just see the moon being the orange red and no real changes to it for 2 minutes in the timelapse. And during that time, the moon disappeared as the thin high level clouds moved back in. And then I couldn't see it visually to even try and track it, plus there was nothing left to see.
About a half hour later of watching the moon, I started to see an area of the clouds starting to brighten up a bit. It was the moon! It was calling out to me, and trying to show me where it was!
As the moon was coming out of the eclipse, it was getting brighter, and it was able to start burning it's way through the clouds. Once I could see it, I recomposed the camera on it, and started the game of following it with the camera and taking photos continually. Then after about 15 or 20 minutes, the moon dipped under the clouds, and I had a perfect view of the moon until it set below the horizon.I will mention it had gotten down into the teens that night. So I ended up having to put on my long thermals, and then on top of that I put insulated snow pants, and I had my normal jacket on, and then put my winter jacket on top of that. I got out a few heating pads to put into my gloves. It's not hard to stay warm if you are moving around, but having to stand and/or squat mext to a camera for 4 or 5 hours in the dead of the night, there is no muscle movement to help generate heat. So I am glad I had thrown all of my winter gear into my 4Runner before heading out. Of course if only I had remembered to throw the Astro tripod in the back also, I wouldn't have had to stand next to the camera all night long....
I wonder how many chapters this story will turn into....
Well, I should wrap it up. But all of what I wrote was just a prelude to the amount of time it took to do this project. I spent roughly 30 hours processing this. The exposure and converting part was simple because I had shot in Aperture Priority with Auto ISO. The exposure was pretty well nailed all night long. But because I had to track it all night long manually, and also with the manual tracking the camera wasn't rotating along with the moon, I now had to both manually move each shot to line them up with each other in terms of centering them back in the frame, but also the rotation of the moon in the frame.
My first pass through took close to 10 hours. I started in the front with the first moon image and just keep aligning and rotating, it was a very tedious effort. I had tried to load them all in a stack and let Photoshop align them, but that didn't work at all. So I had no choice but to manually do it. Well, I got through the Pre-Eclipse stage fine, I went into the Eclipse stage, and aligned them all fine, but when I got to the Post Eclipse part and the moon was coming out of the clouds, I realized I had moved the moon enough with my rotations, that if I continued the clouds would be sitting at a 45 degree angle.... Until there were clouds, there was no way for me to really keep an eye on what was what.... ugh... So I realized I needed to start from the back where I could keep the clouds level and then work in reverse...
I needed to take a few days off before starting that over again, and in the process I am busy with the grandkids and then driving back out to California for Thanksgiving.
5 or 6 days ago I picked it back up and finished it, again a bunch of hours later, I had them lined up, and back into individual images that I then could pull into Movavi for creating the timelapse.
So, I will admit it isn't perfect. Perhaps if I hadn't pulled back the curtain so much, for some of you, you might not even realize there was issues, though I know many of you are eagle eyed (you know who you are) and even without an explanation will see some of my struggles.
I had looked at some other peoples timelapses on the Lunar Eclipse on YouTube, and a lot of them were really poorly done, with the exposure jumping all over as the person was manually changing the exposure every 15 or 20 minutes during the night, etc... So I hate to grade my efforts using a curve scale, but I think my end result was pretty good compared to a lot of what I saw people had done. It will be 3 more years before the next Lunar Eclipse, and you can bet your last dollar, that I won't be forgetting any tripods when that occurs!
Thanks, and I hope timelapse is enjoyed.
As usual, if you haven't Subscribed to my YouTube Channel, please do. Help me get to 500 Subscribers.
Jim
