Goose the Blog 2.0

I'm not going to win any photography awards for them but, after figuring out how to manually set the shutter speed on our digital camera, I was able to get some photographs of the moon being eclipsed that weren't terribly over- or underexposed. When the moon was still mostly showing white, the shutter speed had to be down around 1/60 sec, but for the totally eclipsed moon, the shutter speed was 8 sec (a tripod was definitely necessary!). I don't have a fancy lens, so the photos were taken at 3x optical and 4x digital zoom. In retrospect, maybe I should have used manual focus as well. Anyway, the photos will give you an idea what it all looked like if it was too cloudy to view where you were last night. I went out to see what the moon looked like about halfway through totality, but the clouds had come back in and the moon was so dim (and orange!) I could just barely see it. I couldn't find it in the camera viewfinder at all, so there are no pictures of that.

What have I learned? 1) How to set the shutter speed manually, and 2) Our digital camera is better at looking at bright things than I am, but I am better at looking at dim things than it is. I'll work on my technique and get ready for March, 2007.