03/12/19 Blood Moon Eclipse over Little Rock–Featured Arkansas Photography

Blood moon eclipse over Little Rock Arkansas

Blood Moon Eclipse, over Little Rock Arkansas.  Taken with a Nikon D810A and Nikon 200-400 lens over a 1 and 1/2 hour time frame.

On the evening of January 20th, 2019, there was an excellent situation for astro photographers.  There would be a “super” moon combined with a “blood” moon.  The super moon denotes the larger size and greater brightness of the moon, and the blood moon refers to the blood red/in this case orange color of the moon.  Full lunar eclipses happen often, but the combination of a blood and super moon during a full lunar eclipse is rare.

I have tried multiple times to capture a blood moon, but have been thwarted due to weather, or poor photographic technique.   On this night, the sky remained clear throughout the entire eclipse and offered excellent viewing opportunities.

For the capture, I used my Nikon D810A, which has a slightly better high ISO dynamic range over my D850.  I did sacrifice a considerable amount of resolution in doing this, but I preferred to have a great chance of capturing the overall full eclipse.  The results were impressive.  I used the Nikon 200-400 F4 lens at 400mm the entire time of the shoot.  I varied my ISO range from 800 to 5000, and found the best results were when I took slightly longer exposures in the ISO 1200 to 2500 range.

Written for www.photosofarkansas.com on 03/11/19, please do not reproduce any of this content without express permission from Paul Caldwell