When a work trip to Vancouver was canceled while I was in Seattle, I decided to rent a car and head on down to the Columbia River Gorge where I used to live and visit friends and old haunts. As it so happened, just that morning as I was about to pack up the car and leave, I received an email from a friend pointing out that a full lunar eclipse was supposed to occur that evening. I'd never really been much interested in the whole camping in the out-of-doors till the rear-end of the night routine that is usually associated with astrophotography, but between having a fellow photographer friend in the area (misery does love company) and the benefit of already being pretty much out-of-doors in the Gorge, I decided to give it a shot.
Trouble being, I had no proper equipment. It was sort of ironic all around - I was literally cleaning out my phone's address book earlier that week, and finally deleted an entry for Portland's Photo Pro, thinking "oh, I'm never going to use them again now that I've moved out of the area." Welp, thank goodness for Yelp, 'cause I found myself right back on their front doorstep on my drive down from Seattle. Then it was a mad scramble for whatever they had on hand (at first they didn't have any tripod on hand except for a monster of a video-tripod, but then stole someone else's carbon fiber tripod reservation if I promised to bring it back in time for them to pick it up, and then they gave me the fanciest digital shutter release I had ever seen which, thankfully, I didn't have to learn to use because I actually discovered that I, in my infinite preparedness, had actually brought my manual shutter release cable - even though I didn't have a tripod so no idea how that was going to be useful to me). Knowing nothing about moon photography, I simply asked them to suggest a lens for me - and thank goodness they're the experts, because they threw a cannon of a 400mm lens at me ... and my friend and I discovered that it was only just enough. He had a 200+mm, and it just wasn't quite up to snuff. (Sadly, he's a Canon person while I'm a Nikon, so I couldn't even offer to let him borrow my lens. Boohoo.)
A camera's inferiority to the human eye is never so apparent as when one tries to do photography in the middle of nowhere at night. I tried to take a snapshot of our setup with my iPhone, and lol it couldn't even find anything to focus on until I cheated and opened a car door, letting it focus on the frame and light, and then quickly switching over to our cameras and then taking a shot.
I hadn't exactly packed my trip anticipating that I would be out on a windy hill from 2 am - 5 am (it was chilly enough that it snowed in the higher hills just a few days later), so it was a lot of dashing to my camera, taking a few photos, then dashing into the car and hibernating for a few minutes, then dashing back out. I was pretty much ready for the event to be over by 3 am, but it didn't even really reach full eclipse until 4 am - sadly, our position on the globe didn't afford us a perfectly centered eclipse, but close enough!
Though it makes sense that the shadow wouldn't creep over the moon in a perfect line, I found myself surprisingly irritated by this when sorting through the images later. I kept wanting to rotate them to line up, but then the craters were out of place. My inner OCD child threw a few fits over this before I managed to move on.
Trouble being, I had no proper equipment. It was sort of ironic all around - I was literally cleaning out my phone's address book earlier that week, and finally deleted an entry for Portland's Photo Pro, thinking "oh, I'm never going to use them again now that I've moved out of the area." Welp, thank goodness for Yelp, 'cause I found myself right back on their front doorstep on my drive down from Seattle. Then it was a mad scramble for whatever they had on hand (at first they didn't have any tripod on hand except for a monster of a video-tripod, but then stole someone else's carbon fiber tripod reservation if I promised to bring it back in time for them to pick it up, and then they gave me the fanciest digital shutter release I had ever seen which, thankfully, I didn't have to learn to use because I actually discovered that I, in my infinite preparedness, had actually brought my manual shutter release cable - even though I didn't have a tripod so no idea how that was going to be useful to me). Knowing nothing about moon photography, I simply asked them to suggest a lens for me - and thank goodness they're the experts, because they threw a cannon of a 400mm lens at me ... and my friend and I discovered that it was only just enough. He had a 200+mm, and it just wasn't quite up to snuff. (Sadly, he's a Canon person while I'm a Nikon, so I couldn't even offer to let him borrow my lens. Boohoo.)
A camera's inferiority to the human eye is never so apparent as when one tries to do photography in the middle of nowhere at night. I tried to take a snapshot of our setup with my iPhone, and lol it couldn't even find anything to focus on until I cheated and opened a car door, letting it focus on the frame and light, and then quickly switching over to our cameras and then taking a shot.
I hadn't exactly packed my trip anticipating that I would be out on a windy hill from 2 am - 5 am (it was chilly enough that it snowed in the higher hills just a few days later), so it was a lot of dashing to my camera, taking a few photos, then dashing into the car and hibernating for a few minutes, then dashing back out. I was pretty much ready for the event to be over by 3 am, but it didn't even really reach full eclipse until 4 am - sadly, our position on the globe didn't afford us a perfectly centered eclipse, but close enough!
Though it makes sense that the shadow wouldn't creep over the moon in a perfect line, I found myself surprisingly irritated by this when sorting through the images later. I kept wanting to rotate them to line up, but then the craters were out of place. My inner OCD child threw a few fits over this before I managed to move on.
I was surprised by how even a tiny place like Hood River and the surrounding towns still threw up enough light pollution to make it difficult to capture the night sky. It really drives home just how much our artificial lights can affect our environment.
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Cook-Underwood, Columbia River Gorge, WA
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