I’m doing a little practice for the solar eclipse by photographing the (nearly) full moon tonight.

My “second best” digital camera doesn’t have as strong a zoom, and can’t seem to autofocus on the moon (and has no manual override), so I wasn’t able to do anything with it tonight. It should be more useful on the day of the eclipse… when there’s some better lighting to work with during setup. My plan is to put it on a tripod, set it for video recording, aim it at the sun, and let it run for the three minutes that the Main Event is happening.

My “best” digital camera is working a bit better. It has a maximum zoom of 720mm-equivalent, which makes for a pretty good close-up of the Moon… or Sun. It’s a little hazy here tonight, which complicates things a bit, but it is able to autofocus reasonably well on the Moon. It also has a manual-focus override, which is kind of clumsy to use, because it isn’t a straight-forward mechanical system, and it doesn’t have a sharp screen to focus with. I’ll probably end up using some combination of the two modes. Tonight I got some decent shots of the Moon, which give a preview of what kind of close-up framing I should be able to manage of the eclipse.

I still need to do some practice shots of the full Sun… but that’ll have to wait for daytime. 🙂 Those will involve using an eclipse filter to get usable exposures.