I went over to my deputy group leader's house last night because he was setting up his 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope to look at the eclipse with. Between the two of us (mostly him), we had quite a bit of fancy optical gear. His telescope was on a good tracking mount and never needed a single adjustment during the four hours we were out. He attached a film camera to the side of the telescope and took some ASA 1600 color print pictures. He also had a pair of image-stabilizing binoculars and a camcorder. I brought my tripod and DSLR with the 100-300mm lens (35mm equivalent to 480mm at full zoom). I took just over 100 pictures of everything from full moon to full moon.

The lunar eclipse is a nice leisurely photographic subject as totality lasts a good hour and twenty minutes. The onset of the shadow is slow and there were plenty of opportunities to catch each phase of the eclipse on CCD despite the large clouds that were periodically obscuring the view. At one point we even went inside for 15 minutes to warm up and look at pictures of the solar eclipses that Steve has photographed (the most recent of which, in Australia, only had 30 seconds of totality!).

The clouds were basically non-obtrusive during the lead-up to totality and throughout totality, but they were frequently in the way during the return to full moon, so there are less pictures of that portion of the show. Actually the cloud cover was almost constant during this time but there were periodic 2-10 second holes in clouds where I could snap off a few pictures. Still, because the clouds were moving so fast and the eclipse progressed so slowly, I managed to get a good representative sample of images.