The third and fifth are my favorites, because it looks like a giant red balloon with the round spot. The bws are nice too but I’m thinking of the 99 red balloons (only in English version).

Yeah I was using a reflector telescope on a tripod with a counterweight so once the moon reached peak sky height, I had to flip the orientation of the telescope. Basically the reason why they flipped was because I kept the camera leveled with the horizon while I flipped the telescope instead of also flipping the camera.

I thought you’d never ask haha, I wanted to share more details but didn’t want to just keep rambling about things, now that the post seems to be getting lots of likes I suppose I need to share more details anyways.

So I am using a mirrorless camera (fujifilm x-s10) with a reflector telescope (celestron omni xlt 150) being used as a prime lens, this effectively becomes a 750mm camera lens but with a big opening and on a tripod with counterbalance weight and motorized ra/dec.

Once I took the photos I took them into a software called darktable which is a general photo editing tool to clean up the 9 photos of the moon + the night sky background picture (had to sort through the other 30 or so I took) and then I took them into another software tool called gimp which is more or less similar to Photoshop so that I could make the collage photo.

I tried a lot of different ways of exposing the image since this was my first lunar eclipse I didn’t know which settings would be the best, what I noticed when I sorted my images into the final ones was that they all ended up being typical exposure settings (keeping the iso as low as possible and shutterspeed set after, in this case the aperture is fixed because its the telescope so no adjustment there)

Usually my telescope photos are limited by weather quality (highly reccomend astrospheric both as a general weather app and as a astrophotography app) but this time I felt that the telescope mirror quality was my limiting factor, reflecting telescopes are basically how you get the most for your money as opposed to ones with lensing will generally be very high quality images but limited on aperture light capture, it is also necessary to collimate and allow telescopes to reach ambient temperature before taking the photos otherwise the images will turn out more blurry, that can be tricky if the temperature is always moving, the lunar eclipse night happened to get down to low 40s fahrenheit so it was just about as ideal of a temperature as possible to avoid dew.

I was actually surprised by how much of a mental challenge it was to stay mentally coherent enough to think about the details of taking these photos (since I had to stay up through the entire night) I could have avoided this by setting the camera to take pictures at intervals with whatever exposure setting but this was my first lunar eclipse so I just decided to do all of it manually by getting up about Evey 30 minutes.

I don’t remember where specifically I pointed the camera for the night sky picture but it was roughly inline but out of the way with the moon going upward in the sky near the peak I think

Red’s only there in this constellation, when the sunlight goes throug earth’s atmosphere.