![]() Time-lapseĪs I had set up an intervalometer to shoot once every minute (and in between I would manually shoot), a time-lapse video is something I thought would be a good idea. Note that dark frames do not help the quality of short lunar exposures, so after I tested to make sure I ended up not using them for the time-lapse to speed up my processing. Short exposures are pretty hard to mess up, and even if you do have some that are not great, you can simply stack the rest. Even if you have devoted more time to your setup a spoiled 10-15 sec exposure at low ISO (bad tracking, vibration etc) means you lose the photo, which might not be good for something like at time-lapse. To better understand the difference, a 100% crop between the single image and the stack of 5 exposures is shown below:Īnd this is a good reason to go with short exposures on high ISO. The fourth at 100/4 = 25% opacity and so on (the formula is 100/n so the next values are 20%, 17%, 14% etc…) The above images as a stack of 5 exposures each are shown below: The third image is added as a new layer on top of the other two and set at 100/3 = 33% opacity. You switch the layer to blending mode “difference” to ensure perfect alignment, then switch back to “normal” blending mode with 50% opacity. The process is simple, you add the second image as a layer on top of your first image. Due to the nature of lunar eclipse photography where you have only a handful of exposures for a specific phase of the eclipse, it is possible to stack manually using Photoshop. You might be familiar with stacking of deep space photos on programs like DSS or stacking of planetary videos on Registax / Autostakkert. However, with the “magic” of stacking, we can combine multiple “grainy” short exposures for great results. You can see that my camera is a bit grainy at ISO 1600, which might seem like a drawback of going for short exposures. Here are a couple of example shots at 40 minutes before maximum and at maximum respectively: I had an intervalometer shooting once every minute and between two auto-shots I could try out longer or shorter exposures for a different effect. I chose the latter because I wanted a quick setup with not very precise polar alignment and also the ability to do many test exposures. ![]() ![]() While you will start a lunar eclipse session with ISO 400 or less and exposures at 1/1000s or so, near the eclipse maximum you will need to either go to the ISO 400 / 15 sec exposure route, or ramp up the ISO to something like 1600 where you might be OK with just 1 or 2 sec exposures. For more pics and the how and why of the session and the timelapse, read on.
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