Hulk'in Lunar Eclipse

In 2003, I had gotten some nifty pictures (see below) of the eclipsed moon moving through tree branches ... but this time, I decided to see if I could get The Incredible HULK in the picture. Because of the angle, I had to drag him down from the balcony (he's up there as part of my halloween decorations) and I propped him up against a ladder on the left top of my driveway. I rotated him to various angles, but this one seemed to be the best. I then ended up placing the 8 megapixel Sony F828 on the concrete of the right side of the driveway so that I could get things lined up so the moon was next to the Hulk. BTW, I could not actually see the Hulk in the viewfinder, so I'd have to shoot the picture (with flash), and then move right/left/forward/back to get things lined up. Complicating this was that the moon moves (!) ... so I had to keep moving closer an inch or so every few minutes as the moon climbed higher in the sky.

I had planned to illuminate the Hulk with a spotlight, but the bulb crapped out on me, so I used the digicam flash cranked as high as it would go. I left the EXIF header in the image above - the camera settings on the Sony F828 were ISO 64, F2.8, 1/2 second exposure, full zoom (200 mm equivelent), and manual focus of 5 meters (top shot) and infinite (bottom shot). The large picture you see above is a Photoshop merge of the two (basically cut-n-pasted the moon) so that you see both the Hulk and the moon in focus - no other digital alterations were done. Total of 121 pictures were shot in an hour or so, and the top shot to the left was shot at 20:17:28 MDT and the bottom one was shot 15 seconds earlier.

There is a 2006 lunar eclipse on March 14-15th and September 7th, but not a total one - for that, you have to wait for the 2007 lunar eclipse which happens on March 3rd and August 27th and there are a variety of company's that offer lunar eclipse tours, although solar eclipse tours tend to be more popular. I'll just stay home and shoot pictures and what will I do different this time? First, it was a bummer the spotlight died on me, as the Hulk could have used a little more illumination. Also, I would put the Hulk up on a car (or a hill somewhere) because I really needed to get him up higher so I could shoot from further back and therefore have the relative size of the moon be larger compared to the Hulk (plus this would help with depth of field focus). Finally, I'd reverse the eclipse - that might take some work!

So with some help from PhotoShop, here's what that might look like ... ;-)

Email the Big Green Guy and don't forget to support The Hulk for President!

Dirk & Kyle, my 2 and 5 year old boys thought it was pretty cool watching "the moon get eaten" while I shot a few pictures with a 4 megapixel Canon G3 digicam. I used the timed shutter release with the full 4X optical zoom (140mm equivelent) at F3.0, ISO50, with the exposure times as noted. I was just playing around with the exposures to see what looked best, and didn't even realize I had the tree branches in the shot. This ended up being different/neat compared to most lunar eclipse pictures that I've seen as it clearly shows how the moon "moves" across the sky in the 114 seconds between the first and last shot. Click here to see a blow up of the picture to the left.

For those interested in space stuff, I happened to have some webcam pictures of Aurora Borealis from Boulder Colorado which includes The Incredible Hulk! And if you want to look the "other direction" (i.e. from space back to earth), check out these satellite photos of my house. And here's a few pictures of a Lunar Cresent.


Alek's personal home page - ©2003-2004 www.komar.org


P.S. It was interesting/humourous to explain/diagram to the Boys how the Earth moves between the Sun and the Moon to cause the eclipse - I felt like a modern day Galileo! ;-)