Night Sky Photos… or How I Failed Photographing the Super Blood Moon

Like many people I know (And around the world) I went outside on September 27, 2015 to watch and take photos of the Super Blood Moon and lunar eclipse. I was very excited about it for a variety of reasons, but I was probably the most excited to take photos of the moon! I was planning on it for weeks and had my camera charged and ready to go that Sunday. What I wasn’t planning on was my camera tripod breaking two days before the big event. I tried to fix it, but no matter what I did nothing worked. (As of this post the tripod is still broken, but should be fixed as soon as the weather improves allowing me to E6000 the broken pieces together!)

When the super blood moon with eclipse happened, I was without a tripod. Normally this isn’t a bad thing and I can work without it, but my poor Sony camera, which is four years old now, is starting to show it’s age and now gets finicky when photographing things a night. It’s ok if I let it expose for long periods of time, but when it comes to photographing things like the moon, I get blurry photos. Like this…

And this…

As you can see, the photos are not as clear as ones I’ve seen online and on TV. I’m disappointed with my photos because the super blood moon with lunar eclipse is rare and I wanted to photograph it. And failed.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I took my camera, placed it on the ground with the lens pointed at the sky, and let it expose for a while. And this is the photo I got…

I was so happy! I got a photo of the Milky Way in late September! During a full moon! XD I was so excited the photo turned out well started to take other photos of the stars and Milky Way…

That streak of light in the top left corner was an airplane flying overhead. I decided to take the photo before it was out of my camera’s line of view. Oops.

As for the moon, I tried to take a photo of it again but they didn’t turn out right until I let my camera expose as long as I do when I take photos of the stars. This is was the only time my photos of the moon turned out clear…

Although the clear photos I took of the moon are not close-ups, my camera was able to pick up the light of the stars at the same time. That shows how dark it got during the lunar eclipse!

Well, there you have it! That’s how I failed taking photos of the super blood moon this year! I hope by the time there is a super blood moon and lunar eclipse at the same time I’ll have a better camera to capture it with. Or not care about taking photos of it at all and just enjoy watching it. 🙂

Thank you for reading!