Last night an almost total lunar eclipse turned the full moon blood-red due to the refracted light from the sun through the earth’s atmosphere. Lunar eclipses are more common than solar eclipses but due to the much larger size of the earth, are visible over much wider areas and take hours to complete.
I had written this one off since we just returned from photographing the solar eclipse in Spain and due to multiple forecasts predicting nearly total cloud cover. I went out around 10:00 PM and it was starting to rain so I figured that was it. Around 11:30 I decided to take another look and lo and behold the sky was completely clear!
At first the moon was blocked by trees from the observatory but was visible from our porch. I started taking photos just before midnight with a Canon R8 and 800 mm telephoto. When it got higher I opened the observatory roof and took a bunch of photos and movies with the 12.5 inch telescope.
It will take a while to process the images to make high definition photos that are hopefully suitable for printing. The challenge is dealing with the huge difference in brightness between the area in earth’s shadow and the bright remaining portion of the full moon.
This is just a quick snap from the Canon taken 12:07 AM, about 6 minutes before totality.
