Lunar Eclipse

Early Tuesday morning the Earth passed between the Sun and the Moon causing a lunar eclipse. While not particularly rare, lunar eclipses can be very interesting to observe as the moon turns an eerie brownish-orange. Tuesday was no exception.

The event didn't start until a very inconvenient 1:51 AM PDT. That in itself wouldn't have been so bad if it happened quickly, but of course the Earth isn't known for its quickness. It takes Earth's shadow about an hour to cover the Moon, spends another 90 minutes completely covering the moon in an event known as totality, then finally meanders its way back across the moon in the other direction for the next hour. So watching the whole thing is a pretty serious commitment. On this particular Tuesday morning that would have meant you wouldn't be able to go back to bed until 5:24 AM PDT.

I'm not that hard-core. I'm used to staying up late, so staying up until 1:51 wasn't a problem. Around that time I went outside with my tripod and camera and set out to photograph the eclipse. Earlier that night we went out and picked up a remote switch for my camera. This allows me to control the shutter on my camera without physically touching the camera, which turns out to be really important when you're taking pictures at night, because just the slightest movement will blur everything in your photo. I also looked through my camera's manual and figured out how to lock the mirror up, because apparently even the movement of the mirror in an SLR camera can shake the camera enough to ruin some low-light photos.

So I felt fairly prepared and I took a bunch of pictures of the moon and finally gave up around 4 AM after nearly 2 hours just as totality was ending. I figured I had already seen the first half and the second half would probably be pretty similar. Plus I was really tired and had to work in a few hours.

I ended up with a bunch of photos and I think some even turned out alright. I took a few from the various stages of the eclipse and put together in this montage. You can clearly see the Earth's shadow creeping across the moon from left to right until it completely covers the moon. At that point, the only light reaching the moon to illuminate it is passing through the Earth's atmosphere, which filters out some of the colors, leaving us with this interesting color of the moon.