Trying to take pictures of a supermoon with a Lumix LX-5

I bought my camera to mainly to take pictures on outings and of course my knitting and crochet and other crafts. For this it is excellent.

But hearing of the supermoon and the eclipse (called a blood moon) I decided to set an alarm to get up and see if I could take any photographs and at least to see the event.

I live in a very built up part of the city so I went out shortly before 9pm to see where the moon was and to estimate where it might be at 3am.

I decided to see what my camera would make of the moon. I knew I would not get a ‘see every crater’ photograph but it seemed worth experimenting.

So I set my camera to a fairly standard setting for me of aperture priority and f 4.0 and chose the highest ISO I could get of 12800: a crazy number! and held it as steady as I could (I have no tripod but I do have a window sill!) and took this. It was a 1/20 sec exposure. I suppose I should have used the lowest f number but I didn’t. Of course the result was very grainy.

These were only experiments so I decided to change the ISO back to my preferred 100 and left everything else the same and got a 4 sec exposure. I was pleased that I seemed to have manged to hold the camera reasonably steady.  The round blobs are from a plane that was passing.

I could see that I wouldn’t get much detail on the moon, but this didn’t surprise me. However it seemed worth a shot at 3am so I left my camera on the appropriate windowsill the other side of the house.

Even at a quarter past three the earth’s shadow was not fully covering the moon but I tried a few shots. This time it was much harder to hold the camera steady as the moon was higher in the sky. However I got this one that is almost okay. By now I had decided to use the scene setting on the camera for ‘Night Scenery’ because it has given me quite good photographs in the past. I meant to use a focal length of 90mm but I must have only set it up to 70 for this one. The camera chose f 3.0 and ISO 800 for 1/3.2 sec.

I kept trying to take photographs between then and getting on for four o’clock but most were obviously more or less shaky like this one. This is at the bad end of shaky!

About half-past three I decided to try pushing the camera up to it’s maximum digital zoom of 480mm equivalent, since I knew I would be cropping the photographs, and got this. Still maybe not full shadow. f 3.3, ISO 80, 8 sec exposure. (I had to down scale this one for the blog!)

The best I could get at about ten to four was this. Back to 90mm but the camera chose the same settings as above.

And the final photograph upscaled. An interesting experiment which has taught me a few things.

I did have a crochet post almost complete but that will have to wait now.