Friday, June 25, 2010

Pre-Eclipse Agony

Ugh, I'm so anxious about tomorrow night's eclipse. Especially since there is cloud cover tonight and has been that way for the past week. Last week was clear and beautiful. This is definitely part of the love/hate relationship I have with lunar photography. I can plan and scout ideal locations as much as I want but it doesn't really matter if nature decides to blow a storm system in. I was planning on getting some great shots of the receding eclipse as it descends into into the Pacific but now I think I'll be lucky if I get ONE shot of the eclipse at it's peak.

To emphasize my point take this evening as an example. Today the moon rose in San Jose at an azimuth of 122° which is the EXACT same azimuth that it will rise tomorrow. I went to my favorite secret moonrise shooting location to get a bearing on where it would appear over the horizon but was greeted with a WALL of cloud cover that looked nice from a 'photographing clouds just before sunset' perspective but what I wanted was a clear view of the moon bursting over the horizon.


*For reference this shot was taken @ 50mm on my 50-500mm Bigma*

See the building at the lower left? The moon was supposed to come up over that area, and technically it already had when I took this pic, but was completely shrouded by clouds. The glowing dot toward the middle right of the image among the clouds is a plane approaching San Jose Airport. I stayed and waited for an hour with no success. Even more heartbreaking was the fact that to the west there was no cloud cover on the horizon, all the clouds were higher in the sky.

I will try again tomorrow but without having an exact visual cue of where to aim my lens I'll be going on rough estimates provided by GPS pointers in my phone. It was important to have an exact reference point because tomorrow I wanted to use my 1000mm lens to capture the moon coming over the horizon which would have been a first in my nearly 3 years of shooting the moon. There is so little room for error with the 1000mm lens, just 1/4° degree on each side of the moon. While each month there is often a point when the moon rises in the same spot on successive days it RARELY happens with full moon conditions, and is even less rare with a full moon that will be eclipsed later that evening. But such are the woes of being a nature photographer. I'm sure 1000 other photographers world wide had carefully planned shots ruined due to cloud cover today, and I'm sure it will happen to many others and myself in the future.

Trying to remain positive I'm definitely glad that tomorrow nights eclipse won't be a TOTAL eclipse, just a partial. That means the moon should cast enough light to shine through moderate cloud cover. I certainly have enough experience shooting gibbous and even crescent moons in a wide range of cloud conditions but I still feel nervous about tomorrow night.

As I write this every location within an hour drive of San Jose is forecast to have overcast or partially cloudy conditions. But that is 26 or so hours away from now. I guess I should just sit back and wait to see what nature gives me.

But I still have every finger and toe crossed that San Jose/Santa Cruz fog doesn't roll in until after sunrise. I won't even waste prayers on fog free conditions in SF, I know better than to ask for miracles. Please cross your fingers and toes with me :)

2 comments:

  1. Even though I don't understand 99% of what you are talking about I'm in awe of your lunar brilliance and plan to stalk you forever. Unless you turn out to be an Elvis impersonating cyborg, that is. SEriously cool website. Makes me want to be smarter. Lots smarter.

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  2. Yay, thanks Omi! Stay tuned, I plan on edifying the masses, or at least providing eye catching moon images :)

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