On the Cusp of Totality

The total lunar eclipse of May 15-16 was visible in most of the Americas. I love the transition between partial and total eclipse. It is difficult to image because this time has the highest dynamic range. Weather in Austin was poor for the eclipse with very poor transparency. This made the eclipse very dark and obscured detail.

Fortunately views were better through the telescope. I used automatic HDR exposure bracketing. This HDR image was taken at 2022-05-16 03:28 UT as the last few rays of direct sunlight were falling on the SE limb of the Moon. I used exposures of 2" and 30" for the HDR moon. A third HDR layer for the background stars was taken the 30" exposure and further exposure stretched with a star mask.

Equipment includes a Questar 1280/89mm f/15 telescope and a Sony a6100 mirrorless camera. Processed using CaptureOne, Topaz DeNoise AI, and Photoshop.

A crop from the 2 sec exposure is shown below:

My setup in action is shown below:

Content created: 2022-05-16

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