Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Blood Moon is just an evocative name for a total lunar eclipse, which occurs when the Earth lines up perfectly in between the Sun and the Moon. So the Moon is completely covered in the Earth's shadow. It's getting no direct sunlight. The reason that the full moon turns this shade of red orange reminiscent of blood is because there is still sunlight from the Earth's atmosphere still reaching the Moon's surface. And the Earth's atmosphere refracts blue light really strongly, which leaves this very reddish orange light that's still hitting the Moon. And something that's really exciting actually about total lunar eclipse is is each one will have a slightly different color due to the different amounts of water vapor and particulate matter in the Earth's atmosphere that particular night. A blood moon is a really fun astronomical event to witness firsthand. And the next one will take place here in 2022 on Sunday, May 15th, into the morning of Monday, May 16th. And the east coast of the US, where I'm located, will be very well positioned for it, as long as we don't get clattered out. If you happen to be watching this video later, like in 2023 or 2024, these five tips I'll share can work for photographing any total lunar eclipse. So tip number one is to find out if you're in the right location to see the eclipse and then find out the key times for when the eclipse starts and ends, including the different phases of the eclipse. My favorite resource for finding these times is time and date.com. That website always seems to have good visualizations, graphics and tables that should tell you the times for your location automatically if you allow your web browser to locate you. So I can see here for my location in Boston, the penumbral phase starts at 9.30 pm on Sunday, local time. I don't really care about the penumbral phase because that just looks like a slight dimming of the moon. But I want to be ready for the start of the partial phase, which starts around 10.30. And then of course, the full totality, which actually when the moon actually turns red, which starts at 11.30 pm and goes for an hour and a half to 12.53 Monday morning. So tip number two is to check whether forecasts and have a vehicle be prepared to move your location to try to find clear skies. For the last total solar eclipse in the US in 2017, I had backups for my backups and I'm very glad I did because I got to see it, but my original couple picks were completely clouded out. So it's the same thing with the lunar eclipse. If you have partial clouds, you make it a really cool picture. Like I did with my solar eclipse photo here, but you don't want to just get overcast. Because then you're not going to see anything. That's a cloud out. So I recommend checking whether.gov, check clearoutside.com, check the astrosphereic app and astrosphereic.com, and see if you can find a location near you where all these kinds of different forecasts agree that you're going to have clear skies. Before I share the last three tips, let me tell you a little bit about today's sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for designing and hosting a beautiful website or professional portfolio. I've been meaning to revamp my necocarver.com website for years. I know I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but when this opportunity with Squarespace came up, I was just shocked by how fast I could put something together for this revamp with their professional templates. I just chose one I thought looked good, dropped in my photos into different categories that I got to pick, and Squarespace handled the rest. No fiddling with code, it's a responsive design. Everything is, you know, sees what you get, kind of, with the website editor. And I think this would be a great choice if you want to have a nice professional looking spot to share your astro photography with your own domain name, your own design. And so if you're interested, head over to squarespace.com slash nebula photos to start your free trial. And if you like it, you can get 10% off your first purchase with the code nebula photos. All right, tip number three is to pick out what gear you'll use and practice with it before the eclipse. You can shoot the lunar eclipse with a wide angle lens, you can shoot it close up with or without tracking, you can get very cool shots with almost any setup. But the important thing is that you're comfortable with the gear you'll be using, especially if you don't normally shoot a lot of lunar photography, because it's good to remember these steps that you have are gonna have to take to make sure that you have everything ready that you're gonna need and make sure you understand how it all works. Remember that you can still focus on a bright star with a bodenove mask if that's how you're used to focusing and it's clear, you can also focus on the craters of the moon itself, but I'd practice that first if you're not used to focusing on the moon. Sometimes even auto focus will work on the moon if you're using a lens and camera that has that, but always double check your focus with practice shots before just thinking you have the right focus. In terms of the gear I'm planning on personally, I think I'm gonna go pretty lightweight with my setup with this new 800 millimeter RF F11 lens that I picked up recently, pairs with my Canon RA mirrorless camera, and I'm gonna put these on my star adventure to eye tracker, which I can set to lunar tracking mode. I may do a second setup too, but I haven't really decided if I wanna go wide angle or telescope. Anyways, practicing with the gear ahead of time leads me into tip number four, which is to go in with a plan for what you wanna accomplish and then use your practice time to practice that plan. And a plan can be as simple as take one good in focus shot of the blood moon and then just enjoy the rest of the night, or it can be something more complex, like take a perfect time lapse, showing all the phases of the eclipse. That would require a lot more planning since the different phases will require different camera settings as the moon's gonna be a lot brighter in the partial phase than it will be during totality. If this is your first total lunar eclipse, I'd suggest keeping it fairly simple, and just find some good settings for your camera and optics where the moon looks well exposed, and then make sure you focus and take lots of photos during totality. And that way you have the option of stacking them for a sharper result. During the last total lunar eclipse, I took 40 photos with a telescope at F5.6, ISO 800 and one second long exposures, and that let me get both the eclipse moon and the background star field to look pretty good. Now, please take these settings at F5.6, ISO 800 and one second, as just a very rough starting place, because every total lunar eclipse is different, some are brighter, some are darker, and so you're gonna have to adjust the shutter speed yourself on the night of of the actual eclipse to find the right exposure value. This isn't something you can really practice too much ahead of time. If it's a very dark eclipse, you may be doing 10 second or even 20 second long exposures. If it's a very bright eclipse, it might be under a second. And of course, I'd always recommend shooting raw, because then even if you're a bit over-under exposed, you can sort of make up for that in the camera rock and vert. Tip number five is to bring binoculars or a telescope and get your friends and family to come out and take a look, because this is something really cool to directly view, to see the stars and the moon in the same field of view. I just can't really explain why that's so cool, but it's much better seeing it live than in a photo. And that's sort of how I feel about all the eclipse. The photos are nice, but they don't compare to seeing it live through binoculars or just with your own eyes. Well, that's it for this one. I might do a follow-up about processing your blood moon photography. And if you have any of your own tips for shooting a total lunar eclipse, please feel free to leave them in the comment section. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.