To end this otherwise very busy weekend — we had the kids visiting from Seattle — we enjoyed a couple of hours of fairly quiet skywatching.
We were treated to a total Lunar Eclipse, and whereas that's not a terribly rare occurrence, it's still pretty cool to witness. This is what is known as a "Blood Moon," and this particular event was visible from pretty much all of North and South America, as well as the British Isles and Northern Scandinavia.
I don't have any professional camera gear designed to take photos of a dark sky, so I did the best I could, with what I have. My gear is really better suited to take close-ups of bugs and flowers!
This first one was taken at around 8:30PM Pacific, right before the total eclipse started; just a small sliver of light still shows:
The total eclipse (meaning that the Moon is completely darkened by the shadow cast by the Earth) actually lasted slightly over an hour.
This next one was taken a few minutes after maximum totality, at around 9:16PM.
At this point, the Moon is just a pale red and barely visible disc in the sky; the above photo require a four second exposure to show up as well as it does.
As we stood outside and watched, it does what people thought about such events before there was a rudimentary understanding of astronomy and the movement of heavenly objects. I can totally appreciate how the term "blood moon" came about...
For this next one, we move forward to about 10:05PM, or some 20 minutes after the end of totality.
At first glance, you might think it looks a lot like a typical waxing Moon phase... but what's different here is that the entire Moon is still clearly visible because we're actually at a full Moon phase right now. The darker part is not in complete "night," it is merely in the shadow of the Earth.
With an "Umbral Magnitude" (extent of darkening) of 1.195, this will be the strongest Lunar eclipse till May of 2022.
We're grateful that we had a clear night for this heavenly event! Here in Western Washington, clear skies in mid-winter are not all that common.
With
Thanks for reading!
How about YOU? Did you watch the Lunar Eclipse this evening? Get any good photos? Are you interested in astronomy and "heavenly events," in general? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 190121 00:04 PST
0856
Wow, this has been the best photos of the eclipse that I have seen this morning! Did you use anything special to capture it?
I was too lazy to get up at around 4 in the morning to catch it over here...
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Well, thanks!
Nope, just used my regular camera I use for nature photos (mostly); mounted it on a tripod, zoomed to maximum on a "landscape" setting... and most of the exposures were between two and four seconds since there was pretty much NO light.
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Lucky the moon isn't moving too fast then! Well, it is moving fast but relatively speaking..
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Pretty cool huh?
Here in Berkley East we had intermittent cloud cover but it was too damn cold to stay outside much. I mean...it was less than sixty degrees. The wife and I braved the Arctic temps buy bundleing up. I was wearing two sweatshirts and a duster.
and a cigar and whisky....that kept me from freezing in the arctic blast.
pretty cool.
I learnt some stuff
it seems that all full eclipses are blood moons...that reddish tint gives it the name and they all have it.
the 'wolf' part is because it occurs in january. Beats me why..I thought january was aquaris. must be some kind of hippie thing.
the Super part is because it was closest to earth at the time. The moons orbit is eliptical.
so..it was a super blood wolf moon...or a bloody superwolf moon...or a super wolf bloody moon? I dunno. What's politically correct.
speaking of PC...did you catch the news about those mean horrible catholic boys?
Horrible..horrible.
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A bloody super wolf moon... or sumpthing.
My friend Robert — who happens to be 100% Apache — says the "wolf" part is because wolves howl at the Moon (which they always do) and it's loudest in January when there are no leaves to muffle the sound and snow/ice cover to make it carry, as well. Sounds as good as ANY explanation I've heard...
Yeah, I caught a bit about that in my newsfeed. PC or not, I mostly considered that my dad would have beaten the snot out of me for acting like a dork in public. In a group, or otherwise. Of course, these days he'd probably have been arrested for child abuse...
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Contrary to the media's malicious narrative, the kids were not racist rednecks mobbing a Native American elder with hateful slurs. It was quite the opposite.
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Thanks for the photos! It was overcast here. Strange that such events as lunar eclipses can be both explained and predicted far in advance by science, and yet we have flat-earthers and geocentrists infesting the internet with apparent sincerity.
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Oh, come on! Everybody knows the Earth is like a pancake, surrounded by a wall of ice.... :-P
We've had rain and heavy overcast most of the month. It cleared up nicely around 4PM, stayed clear all evening, and by morning we were back to heavy overcast.
Sometimes, people don't want reality to be real... I think they feel overwhelmed by it. The fact that we're inconsequential specks in a virtually infinite multiverse is too much, so they embrace something more fathomable... even if not real.
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I think you made perfect use of what you have camerawise and the photos are magnificent. Eclipses are always fun & mesmerizing.
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It was pretty fun to witness, and to speculate on what people in the distant past must have thought when the familiar moon suddenly became faint and red.
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Here in Italy the lunar eclipse was visible this morning around the 6:00 AM and so just few people watched it. I was sleeping, so I couldn't take any pics, thanks so much to share this wonderful view of the eclipse! ^_^
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You're welcome, Silvia! Yes, the time was a little more "civilized" for us to watch here...
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Nice. What lens did you use?
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Thank you!
It's just my standard Fuji 30x zoom (800mm equivalent) that I use mostly for shooting birds and butterflies and such. Put the camera on a tripod in the back of my truck; shot these at full zoom... somewhere between two and four second exposure on most of them.
I don't know squat about night photography, to be honest... so pretty pleased with the outcome.
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Super Blood Wolf Moon, I think! No view of the sky here.
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Yes, quite a few things, combined. Supposedly won't happen again till May of 2022... and I'm not sure that will be a "wolf" moon.
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That would be the Flower Moon
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