The Lunar Eclipse - Red moon

Last night was the Lunar Eclipse and my daughter made sure that we were out there to see it. She is studying the moon at school and was very excited about this event. She asked me to take pictures, as if I wouldn't have :)

Since we had been having rain and clouds for most of the day, I was not sure that we would even see the moon. But, as we approached 11pm, the clouds were nice enough to separate and give us glimpses of the eclipse.

This image was taken at 10:56pm, showing the partial eclipse. (You can click on any of the images to make them larger.)

 And then another shot taken at 11:18pm showing much less of the moon.

And then at 11:46pm, I fired off this shot of the moon, with the red glow very prominent. It was easy to see the color change, even with the naked eye, but even more exciting when I shot this and we saw the image on the LCD of the camera. (Photographer note: I used my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon 100-400mm lens fully extended out to 400mm. I also used a Canon 1.4x adaptor to extend the range of the lens and get as close as I could. I manually focused, using LiveView to zoom in close and double check my focus detail. The camera was mounted on a Gitzo tripod and I used a cable release to avoid any camera shake when hitting the shutter. I used a combination of shooting in Aperture Priority mode (stopping down 1 to 2 stops) and manual mode, depending on the brightness of the moon. I wanted to keep my ISO as low as possible but needed a fast enough shutter speed to capture the moon clearly, trying to grab the image before the rotation of the earth showed movement in the moon.)