Partial Lunar Eclipse and Pleiades (Mr. Ashley McGlone)

Partial Lunar Eclipse and Pleiades

The cloud forecast did not look good, so I hadn't planned to set up my telescope rig to shoot the partial lunar eclipse on Nov 19 2021. (Some say this is the longest lunar eclipse for the next 581 years.) However, when I woke up to use the bathroom at 3:28AM (4:00AM being the full eclipse), I decided to peek outside. There it is! No clouds! Cloud forecast says 20% to 100% in less than an hour. I grabbed my Canon T3i, 300mm zoom, and tripod. Bolted outside.

It was beautiful! Positioned between Orion and Pleiades was this orange glowing moon about to reach the peak of the eclipse. Knowing that my telephoto lens would not be near as crisp as my telescope, I did my best on focusing and catching a few closeups of the moon. But then I noticed that I could frame Pleiades with it if I zoomed out a bit. That also gave me the advantage of getting a tight focus on the stars in Pleiades to make sure the moon was in focus.

In this shot I tried to balance not over exposing the moon too much, but giving enough exposure to get Pleiades to pop. The moon was actually darker than this at the time.

About that time my wife popped up behind me and said "Wow. You can see it!" …just as the clouds rolled in.This is the last and best shot right as the clouds edged over the moon, and you may catch just a bit of their glow if you look closely.

Thank you, God, for perfect timing to catch this rare event displaying your glory in the heavens. Bring up the brightness on your device to see the Pleiades on the right of the shot.

Tech note: This is a single exposure. The T3i is really noisy in low light like this, but Topaz DeNoise AI was like magic. It cleaned up the noise and even got rid of hot pixels.

Canon T3i
Canon 75-300 Zoom lens @ 155mm
f/5
ISO400
1.3 seconds
Single shot
Topaz DeNoise AI
GIMP - levels, 16:9 crop

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