Since I had written quite a bit already about last night's lunar eclipse experience, I thought I'd throw everything together for the benefit of Tochi Hut readers.
Lunar Eclipse on February 20th, 2008. Toronto was blessed with crystal clear skies, so I was more than happy to settle with the -12C temperatures. Everyone is posting these beautiful photos of the moon eclipse, so I'm doing the same. This photo was taken around 10pm, almost to the point of complete eclipse - cropped a lot. :)
In the following shot, I noticed two bright stellar objects, Regulus (star) at 12 o'clock and Saturn at 8 o'clock to the moon. I zoomed out a bit to catch them into the frame. Looking through the viewfinder, it seemed like I was staring at some distant planet instead of the moon. It was quite a cool extraterrestrial feeling.
After a while, I was getting a little cold. BlueOrca had linked me to a site showing a very cool super long exposure shot of another lunar eclipse. Since I was going inside anyway, I decided to leave my camera out for an hour to capture the following shot.
The original photo was shot at a pretty wide angle, since I didn't really know the path of the moon. The noise reduction processing on the camera took over 30 minutes. The sky colours came out very redish, almost pink. I didn't really know how to fix it, so I just played around with various settings until I got the sky darkish again. I also cropped the photo to "zoom" in on the trail.
It's quite cool to see the moon streak go from almost all red to all white as the lunar eclipse began to unravel. :)