Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, August 28th, 2007, UTC -5 hours) marks the second lunar eclipse of 2007. I’ve been looking through sites today to get some good tips to capture this eclipse on film (literally and figuratively). It is a little late, but if you are wondering, these sites have been a big help:

1. NASA Eclipse Homepage is as good as place as any to start.
2. Find your viewing location’s coordinates using Google Earth or a GPS and plug them into NASA’s Lunar Eclipse Explorer. (Alternatively you can just select a nearby location, but where is the fun in that?) This cool little tool will spit out exact times for all lunar eclipses at a certain location for any century starting with -1999 (2000 BCE) all the way up to 3000. The times provided are an exact measure of returning what lunar eclipse events you will be able to see.

   If you don’t want to mess with the app, this graphic provides a quick reference to see how much of the eclipse you can see. The values attached to the contact curves (e.g. U1, P1) refer to the phases of the eclipse visible for a certain location. So in the Kansas, the eclipse will be visible through the U3 phase; sometime afterwards, the moon will set. The description of each phase is available on the main eclipse webpage.

3. The first result returned by Google when trying to figure out proper exposures is the excellent MrEclipse page. Mr. Espenak has great advice, and his photographs are amazing. His material is great, and with the tables and advice provided I was able to figure out a shooting plan that I hope will provide some great results.

I will post some digital shots tomorrow. If the film comes out, I’ll post it when it gets developed and scanned.