Shooting for the Moon

The moon during the eclipse on Nov. 18.

Last Thursday night I was reminded about a lunar eclipse over the our skies with its peak being at 4 a.m. As a night owl, that is late even for me but I decided to give it a try. It was the longest lunar eclipse in our lifetime so might as well.

The moon is probably something I photographed a thousand times over the last decade. Every time I am at a high school football game and the moon looks cool I snap a picture. The eclipse is different though. For photos and video to work you need light. An eclipse is easy to see with our eyes but getting photos and video of something with low light can be a challenge.

My plan was to put my cameras on tripods but that was scrapped quickly. The moon was too high as the tripod could not support the weight of my cameras looking straight up. Instead I piled some bricks from my garage and posted my video camera at the needed angle for it. It was a tripod on a budget and perfect metaphor for my photography career.

Because of how cold it was I could not just stay outside. Instead I shot a photo and recorded a brief video every 15 minutes. The cold temps caused me to move my cameras back inside every 15 minutes too.

The end result was a video with a timeline of what the moon looked like every 15 minutes for two hours, At 4 a.m. the moon had turned red because of the shadow from Earth. A red moon is tricky to shoot as I’m not sure if my pictures did it justice. The video did better as you could see how far the moon moves in the sky during the night. In my final video I did a timelapse as I condensed how far the moon traveled in 5 minutes to about 30 seconds.

Overall, the lunar eclipse was neat to see but dang was it cold. Also, staying up that late messed up my sleep schedule as it is still odd days later. Might have been better to just watch what others did.

Nathan is the Sports Editor of the Greene County Daily World and can be reached at npacegcdw@gmail.com. His “Low Budget Sports Show” airs weekly on Facebook Live.