My camera... she is still broken

Wednesday night the skies were overcast, so I wasn't able to attempt any photos of the lunar eclipse. Drat. Tuesday night offered intermittent cloud cover, and I took some really cool shots of the moon surrounded and partially obscured by clouds in a manner that created a nifty nebula effect. Or, at least it would have, if the moon hadn't turned out to be way over exposed. So I go back to experiment and practice with aperture and exposure settings, and last night I managed this:



The moon had risen less than an hour before, and boasted a gorgeous honey-golden color. Which I utterly failed to capture by accidentally leaving the camera's white balance set for tungsten light (I'll admit to a slight tweak in Photoshop to enhance some yellow in the shot above, but it's pretty negligible). I used a Canon EF 75-300mm lens (the older version, without image stabilization) with a shutter speed of 1/400, 5.6 aperture and ISO speed of 400. Full moon's not a great time for lunar photography because the lack of strong shadows robs the image of detail, depth and contrast, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. I did a bunch of things wrong here, and the 75-300 isn't the best lens for astrophotography by any means. A lower ISO would've resulted in less noise, and the moon's bright enough to get away with it. Still, another set of data points along my slef-taught journey.

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