[X] My Assistant

[ElkGroveDan]

I took a stab at some photos of the eclipse last night. It was very close to total where I live in Northern California. I was getting a slight amount of glow off of one limb during "totality".

These were all shot with a Canon 400D with Canon's low-end 75-300 5.6 zoom, all at 300mm. The partial eclipse images were f11 1/125 sec ISO 200.

The saturated partial image was f11 3sec ISO 200

The total eclipse image was f5.6 3 sec ISO 400.

I have higher res images of the partial eclipse sequence taken about 5 minutes apart if anyone wants them. After all these years I'm still new at astrophotography, so I'm still getting mixed results. The digital camera sure makes life easy for calibrating exposures though. I'm really unhappy with the images during totality. I have no idea why they aren't sharp. Perhaps the long exposures and the movement of the moon, but I didn't think it would be noticeable at 3 sec.

I only stayed up for totality, as that was almost 3:00 am here and I have responsibilities that require sleep such as a 9-5 job and kids to get to school etc. etc.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[djellison]

Canon's low-end 75-300 5.6 zoom,.

Nice shots - similar to the results I got with the earlier eclipse this year with the same lens. How do you find it? I've had mixed results - I'll have two or three STUNNING shots with it, out of a dozen that are a little average, for whatever reason. I've been so happy with my 17-70mm Sigma that I'm thinking of getting another sigma in the £200-400 range to replace the cheap Canon zoom.

Doug