How To Shoot Tomorrow's Total Lunar Eclipse With Your iPhone

Update: Adjusted time of totality.

Tomorrow night is going to be a very special astronomical event. If you're in North or South America, you'll be treated to a total lunar eclipse!

Times for totality vary, of course, but going by my local time zone (Eastern), I'll be heading out to start watching right around 11:15. That's about 30 minutes before totality (when it will actually be harder to find the moon in the sky) and the perfect time to take some pictures.

If you're lucky, you've got a good rig like the Nikon D3500 where you can manually adjust the exposure and ISO to compensate for the fact that it's dark and the moon is so inconveniently far away.

But most of you will be grabbing the camera you always have with you, the one on your iPhone.

Unfortunately, instead of your pictures looking like this:

They're going to look like this.

Why is that? It's because,  unlike your eyes (or professional photography rigs), the camera sensor on your iPhone automatically adjusts its exposure for the night sky and isn't equipped to faithfully capture objects that are hundreds of miles away.

It's not impossible to get a better shot with your iPhone, but keep in mind if you want to take a mind-blowing shot of the moon in full frame, you need a DSLR camera. Here are a few things to keep in mind to get the best possible shot.

1. Adjust the Exposure

The most important thing to do to try and capture detail is adjust the exposure on your iPhone's camera using AF Lock mode. Press and hold or double-tap on the moon once it's framed in your shot. The Camera app will lock the autofocus and let you manipulate the exposure before you take the shot. Use the brightness slider that appears to reduce the amount of light your iPhone camera is taking in. You'll have a much better chance of capturing all those lunar details. Oh, and don't bother zooming in, all you're doing is pre-cropping the image once you get past the 2x physical zoom on the iPhone's camera.

2. Use a Tripod

If you don't have one for your iPhone already, hop over to Amazon and grab a tripod before tomorrow night. Being able to shoot from a stable surface is the best way to reduce the motion blur that creeps in to your pictures when you take them while holding your iPhone. The iPhone can usually compensate for this when you're taking normal pictures, but when trying to focus on something in the sky, the blur is much more pronounced.

3. Use Your Apple Watch

Rather than mess up the shot by touching the iPhone to take the picture, use the camera app on your Apple Watch to take the pic. It will retain the exposure settings that you manipulated in step 1. Just pop open the app and press the shutter button like you would with the camera app on your iPhone.