Putting the post up now to maybe snag some extra search engine traffic

Photos will appear here in the next hour for the 2008 lunar eclipse visible from North America. Got some good pictures from my home near Dallas, TX. It's cloudy, but the clouds are moving fast so don't pose a huge problem!

And here we are with some pictures!

To take these pictures I used my trusty old Canon 20D with the 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens. I also used a very crappy tripod. In this situation neither the IS nor the tripod helped me much. The first few pictures before the shadow is dominating the moon I took at an Aperture of f14 and a shutter of about 1/250 second. You can see these are much sharper than the latter pictures.

Since the 20D doesn't have a spot meter I had to experiment a bit to find the exposure I wanted. Using center weighted or whole scene metering throws things FAR too overexposed for the moon. When shooting the moon you have to remember that the moon is very very bright compared to it's surroundings. Even using exposure compensation, 2 stops underexposed according to the meter is no where near enough. I think at 1/250 @ f14 the meter thinks I was 6-10 stops underexposed. If I had a spot meter, I probably could have metered on the moon, and dialed it in with EC.

The latter pictures where the shadow dominates my shutter crept down to 1/30 - 1/2 second. These are not as sharp. I tried using IS on mode 2, full IS, sacrificing aperture to bring the shutter up higher and I just couldn't get as sharp a shot. Time for me to get a real tripod.