Earlier this week (Monday, May 16th) there was a total lunar eclipse.
And the picture above is an example of what I saw for most of it! Clouds and more clouds! However, there was a brief 15 minute window where the skies cleared during totality. So with a tripod, no fancy slewing machine and a 500mm manual focus lens, I attempted to take a few pictures.
Focusing takes a few minutes in the dim light (the lens can focus to beyond infinity for some reason, which just doesn’t help); and with the zoomed in view, just touching the shutter button introduces noticeable smearing of the image from vibration within the shot:
I quickly switched to a timed shutter (as I didn’t have a remote option) that would wait a few seconds after the button was pushed before opening the shutter, giving some time for the vibrations to stop.
Out of 22 pictures, these are my best shots:
Each of these were taken with either a 1 or 1.3 second exposure with ISO 6400 or higher (the camera just says Hi 1) and a fixed aperture of f/6.3.
And after those 15 minutes, the clouds began to roll back in, so it was nice to actually get to see it, even if it was for a brief amount of time.
Orthallelous 
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