Lunar eclipse 2018: Tips to click good images on your smartphone

The upcoming lunar eclipse on July 27 will be the longest of this century. The Sun, Earth and Moon will be in a perfect line for 1 hour 43 minutes. The eclipse will be visible from everywhere in India. While professional photographers have already prepared for this eclipse to not miss the occasion, most of us are at the mercy of our smartphone’s camera capabilities…

Here are 11 things you need to know about the eclipse and some tips about shooting good images on your smartphone.

The key is to get a clear and high rise location to click clear photos of the lunar eclipse and not to forget to clean the lenses of your smartphone.

Having a tripod is one of the keys for getting better images of the blood moon. Not just for special occasions, if you’re an avid photographer, a tripod will come in very useful. This will avoid shaky images.

The auto-shooting mode will most likely miss the colour shades of the moon. Always use the pro-mode to have better control over exposure, white balance and shutter speed.

The moon is 384,400 kilometers away, so, there is no point in using your smartphone’s LED Flash to brighten images! Using flash will most likely ruin your images.

There are a number of apps available which allow you to control the exposure, shutter speed and ISO among other things. These apps are Halide, Camera+, ProCam 2 among others. Do note that most of these apps aren't free and you'll have to fork out considerable amount of money.

While it's meant for shooting videos, a great image can be made from a time-lapse video. Use a tripod for best results for time-lapse videos. Do keep in mind that patience is the key while shooting time-lapse videos. If you get two minutes of footage, it will only mean a few seconds of time lapse. So be prepared to shoot at length for better and longer duration of time-lapse footage.

Don’t expect DSLR-like results but high-end smartphones come with pretty solid cameras. For instance, if you’ve phones like Samsung Galaxy Note 8 or OnePlus 5T, they come with secondary telephoto lens. If you’ve add-on accessories like Moment lenses or OlloClip (for iPhones), they give great zoom effect.

Before you start shooting, go to settings to check the image size and megapixels. As smartphones are limited in terms of optical zoom, more megapixels may help in slightly better detailing.

During a typical lunar eclipse, you mostly aim to spot the ‘Blood Moon’ and it’s different shades from darkness to greyish to white to orange and then dark again. While the eclipse will cast a shadow of the Earth on the moon, some sunlight will get refracted to give a glowing red look to the moon.

The lunar eclipse is predicted to start at 10:44 PM on July 27. If you intend to capture the entire eclipse, get ready with your smartphone by 10:40 PM at max.

The partial eclipse starts on 10:44 PM on July 27 while the totality phase will start at 1:00 AM on July 28. This is the time you will get to see the ‘Blood Moon’. The totality phase will end at 2:43 AM on July 28. Following this after 1 hour 6 minutes at 3:49 AM on July 28, the partial eclipse will end.