Magic Lantern video manages to correctly expose both the Moon and Saturn in one video
posted Thursday, February 27, 2014 at 2:26 PM EDT
If you've ever taken a shot at shooting the night sky, you know that a bright moon can completely overwhelm everything else. Expose for the Moon, and you lose the stars. Expose for the rest of the sky, and the Moon gets blown out. But thanks to the capabilities of the Magic Lantern firmware hack for Canon cameras, one astrophotographer was able to capture a video of occultation of the Moon and Saturn—with both exposed correctly.
This last weekend, the Moon occulted Saturn—in other words, Saturn moved behind the Moon, becoming blocked from view. Armed with a 2000mm Celestron C8 lens, a Canon 5D Mark II, Magic Lantern, and some excellent skills, Australian photographer Colin Legg was able to capture this stunning video of the occultation.
Unfortunately, he doesn't reveal much about how he used Magic Lantern, the description is simply:
Captured from Perth, Western Australia, just on dawn.
Equipment: Celestron C8, f/10, prime focus. Canon 5D2, running Magic Lantern RAW video firmware in 3x crop mode @ 1880 x 1056 resolution. 1/60 sec exposure, ISO 200, 10 fps.
We'd love to know a bit more about how Legg was able to capture such dramatically differently lit objects in a single clip. Was it post processing? Was the sky already bright enough as the sun was rising? Regardless, it's a stunning piece of footage of an astronomical event.
(via PetaPixel)