 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's 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 eclipses 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 clouded 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 timeanddate.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 p.m. 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 wanna 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 p.m. and goes for an hour and a half to 12.53 Monday morning. So tip number two is to check weather 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 wanna just get overcast because then you're not gonna see anything, that's a cloud out. So I recommend checking weather.gov check clearoutside.com check the Astrospheric app and astrospheric.com and see if you can find a location near you where all these kinds of different forecasts agree that you're gonna 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 nicocarver.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 wanna have a nice professional looking spot to share your astrophotography 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 are gonna have to take to make sure 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 Bodnov 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 autofocus 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 2i 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 F 5.6 ISO 800 in 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 5.6 ISO 800 in 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 or under exposed you can sort of make up for that in the camera raw converter. 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 eclipses. 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.