Partial Eclipse Composite with Freedom Tower

A photo composite of multiple exposures. From the photographer: “A wide angle composite showing various phases of the partial lunar eclipse with the Freedom Tower in the foreground. The moon at the maximum eclipse was 37 deg high making it impossible to capture it close to any known points of interest. After due thought, I felt imaging with Freedom Tower will be ideal as I live close to it across the river and it still looks pretty tall! The lunar discs are separated 2.5 minutes apart.

Given how tall the moon is with respect to the ground and how wide I had to shoot (31mm on full frame camera), I couldn’t fill the entire width of the frame with the lunar disc, I just took a part of the lunar trajectory. Thus, I cropped the image to 9:16 which augurs well for Smart Phone lock screen too but more importantly helps show just the key frames without making the moon trajectory dangling in the air.

The foreground shot was taken after the moon exited my camera’s field of view around 12:28 AM EDT. But, at that time it was very overcast and thus you see clouds in the frame. I couldn’t take a shot of the Tower with partly cloudy sky during the eclipse as the moon was already in the frame, so it’d looked very odd to see a bright blob in a long exposure foreground shot.

The images were taken every 30s on an intervalometer. I chose the keyframes based on the times provided here. All the lunar and partially clear sky images were imported into Adobe Photoshop 2024 and stacked in Lighten mode.

I like to annotate eclipse images (both solar/Lunar) to make it more informative. I went ahead and marked the key phases and the timestamp on the image (move the slider on the image).”

Technical details:
Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 24-70 F2.8 L Lens, 31 mm, F8.0
ISO 400, Exp.: 1/200 s