Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

About an hour ago, Tim and I placed the Sony DSC-F828 on a tripod and snapped some pictures of the moon. Because the recent 20-some inches of snow is melting, we’ve had some very thick fog here today, and this evening was no exception. So in order to gauge whether the camera would be suitable for eclipse pictures come March 3, we went ahead and shot the moon, so to speak, through the fog.

And we’re very happy with the results.

As large as the moon may appear to your eye and brain, it’s only 1/2 degree wide, and the entire sky is 180 degrees. Using the camera’s 8.9x digital zoom, we got a picture like the one below. I present it here to demonstrate how small a target the moon is. I’ve significantly compressed the original for display on this site. Click the picture for the full size file.

Now here’s the moon cropped out of that first picture, at native resolution.

For shooting with only the camera’s zoom on a simple tripod through very thick fog, that’s a great result. All camera settings were auto.

We were going to try some shots through the telescope, but because of the lousy weather we didn’t think it was worth the setup effort.

On March 3 when the moon is full and yellow-red, and the weather is (hopefully) clear, we expect to get some good pictures of the eclipse, both from the standalone camera and through the scope.