This image sequence depicts the total lunar eclipse from 15 May 2022. This was one of the more challenging eclipses that I have tried to capture. From my location in the San Francisco Bay Area, the eclipse was already in progress by the time the moon rose above the horizon, and was still very low in the sky when it reached the total phase. In addition, with heavy cloud cover, I only had breaks in the clouds for ~30 s at a time. Fortunately, I got lucky enough with my shots to obtain the image sequence shown here.

Usually for imaging an eclipse I would use my DSLR. However, for the May 2021 eclipse almost 1 year ago, I developed a good procedure using lucky imaging and decided to use it again here. Compared with single exposures, this allowed me to sharpen the images, increase the color saturation, and reduce noise further than would have otherwise been possible. Because things move quickly during an eclipse, I tried to keep things simple and used an 80 mm refractor, coupled with a color QHY 5III 178c camera. To accurately capture the color balance, I performed a white balance adjustment on images captured near the end of the eclipse and used the same settings for earlier images. At least to my eye, this allowed me to faithfully reproduce the colors I saw during the total eclipse. The acquisition details given above correspond to the settings I used during the maximum eclipse.

It is remarkable how much variation in brightness there is between the illuminated portions of the moon's surface and those that are shadowed by the Earth. The human eye can discern this very well, but this is very challenging for almost any camera. For the next time I try this, it seems like it would be worth imaging in 16 bit mode, rather than 8 bit mode as I did here. This might enable me to do an HDR stretch to more faithfully reproduce how the eclipse actually looks as the moon emerges from the Earth's shadow.

In addition, it is also quite striking how different the moon looked at totality versus one year ago. The surface of the moon is much more uniformly illuminated here. This is likely because the moon passed through the center of the Earth's umbra this time around (whereas in 2021, it grazed the edge). In addition, the color of this year's eclipse is a brighter orange compared with one year ago (which had a darker copper shade).

For the image sequence shown here, I had to down-sample the image to avoid having a huge file. A full resolution capture of the moon near maximum eclipse appears in the revisions.

This was my first post in quite a while, after having gone through a particularly busy period at work. It was nice to be out under the stars again! Wishing everyone a fruitful summer of imaging.