Lunar eclipse and time-lapse photography

Total lunar eclipse in Mumbai (10th Dec 2011) provided an opportunity to test my photography, and more importantly patient skills. I set up my tripod in balcony, [yeah my Mumbai home have balconies, 4 of them ;) ] at around 5:45 and started to look for moon. Rise was scheduled at 6:04 and I was desperately in search of moon at scheduled time. Difficulty in locating moon was because of thick pollution layer and on top of that I was looking for moon in wrong direction. Moon rose almost in the North-East and i was looking from East to South-East.

Soon the moon was high enough (or Sun was down enough) to be shot with clarity. It was already partially eclipsed at the time of rise and full eclipse was to begin at 7:30PM. So i had 90 minutes to make a series of progressive captures. I set my cell in alarm mode with 2 minute snooze and result was plethora of shots. Though all could not be used as I realised later that within 2 minutes moon does not move enough to make two distinct image on the same background. So in the final photo I chose 19 photos with 4 minute interval. Keeping a good background was as important. So as soon as moon moved out of my camera view I clicked an image with 3 second exposure, which sets the background of image.

This was my first experiment with time-lapse photography of astral movement. I am pretty happy about it.

Just a word of caution for hobbyist photographers. It is often said that photography is an expensive hobby, but i can definitely add that its not only expensive in terms of money but also in terms of time. It took 2 hours to shoot and 2 hours to compose final image. But its worth spending.