Moonshot

As previously mentioned, I got a new camera. And with the full moon tonight, it's the perfect time for another moon photography test.

The first picture was taken with my new camera, while the second picture with my previous camera, taken last year. The pictures were cropped to 1600x1200 to keep the original size while getting rid of some unnecessary blank space. I should probably adjust the focus settings for a clearer shot next time.

Edit: Took a few more pics after the aforementioned adjustments. Much clearer:

We like the moooon~~~

I've been wanting to take pictures of the night moon with my new camera ever since I got it. Unfortunately, at first I couldn't get the settings right. Then after the eclipse, it's been nearly a month before it was visible in the night sky long enough for me to photograph it (it had already set by the time I got home from work for the past few weeks).

Well, not tonight. Tonight, I got it. The picture on the left was taken with flash fired, while the one on the right was taken without flash. Of course, flash would not reach something as far away as the moon, but I was hoping it would decrease the exposure time. (The moon is quite bright, so longer exposures with the camera would result in pictures with just light, and no details.) Alas, it did not, but the results are still interesting. As you can see, the moon appears with more of a golden hue when the flash was fired, and is closer to the color we're used to seeing with the naked eye.

Once again, feel free to compare with my previous attempt. It should be noted that in this previous entry, the picture where the moon is smaller... was taken with my 5-megapixel Minolta camera, while the the one where the moon appears to be larger was taken with my 2-megapixel Panasonic (with 12× optical zoom). The 2-megapixel camera's moon looks almost as big as the 7.2- megapixel counterpart! (It is still smaller, but the resultant size might have more to do with the angle of the moon than anything else. It also lacks the detail that can be seen from my new camera.)

Turn around, bright eyes

Once upon a time there was light in my life
Now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart

Wednesday, February 20, 2008.

Total. Lunar. Eclipse.

And I actually watched it this time. The next total lunar eclipse won't happen again until 2010, although there will be another lunar eclipse later this year.

More photos I took of the event available here.


Edit: On a side note, while I was taking these pictures, one of my neighbors (or perhaps a neighbor's friend) walked by and inquired what I was doing. He then related to me that, as he works for the fire department, he has noticed that during the nights with full moon, they would often get more calls of people causing disturbances and whatnot... however, he had noticed that the night before, knowing that it would once again be a full moon, there weren't as many calls as he anticipated, and perhaps the eclipse was the reason.

People have often associated the phases of the moon with the madness, hence the word lunatic (luna = moon); I used to think such an association was more in the realm of urban legend, but hearing first-hand anecdotal evidence like this kind of takes away the "friend of a friend" requirement of urban legends.

Test: Photographing the moon

One of the things I've wanted to do was to take a photo of the moon, which I've not had much success of in the past. I tried again with my new camera, testing various settings. This was the best result of the bunch. I've, of course, cropped the picture, as the rest of the canvas in the picture is just black-nothing-ness.

Since I got a decent result, I decided to try again using my Panasonic camera, using basically the same settings. The resultant picture (also cropped) is the one on the right.

The setting that seemed to work well is manual ISO 50, spot metering, with automatic flash.