a lunar interlude – shortest lunar eclipse in 500yrs – and our last blood moon for 3 years

Written by Gary on April 5th, 2015

Last night (4th April 2015) we witnessed our last total lunar eclipse for the next 3 years and apparently the shortest in the past 500 years.

Shooting a total lunar eclipse at totality is challenging however there are are nice features on the Olympus OM-D cameras which do help such as:

continuous live view – no need to always be resorting to mirror lock up as on a dSLR
magnified live view to allow accurate focus which is actually quite difficult near totality
relatively cheap and high quality telephoto reach with the Olympus ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens with Olympus EC-20 2x teleconverter
reasonable ISO performance at ISO 1600

So here are a couple of mine from last night taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with Olympus ZD 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 SWD lens with Olympus EC-20 2x teleconverter to give 800mm focal length (in 35mm full frame terms), on a tripod with IS turned off, but with 12 sec self timer ON to reduce camera shake. Both taken at f/7, 1/2 sec, ISO 1600 and have had some cropping done but minimal processing in Lightroom.

Some cloud over the 1st one: