The moon is going away! (A photo-liveblog)

[brooksmoses]

Lunar eclipse, 10:50pm PST. Hooray; there are enough gaps in the cloud cover to see it through.


11:05pm PST. I don't think that's a star to the upper left, but a fritzled quartet of pixels on the CCD. It's an old camera, and has served well, but it may be time for a replacement.


11:25pm PST. Barely a sliver left, and the clouds are getting a bit thicker -- I was going to continue the every-15-minutes sequence, but it took a few minutes for a large enough clear spot to come by.


11:40pm PST, much longer exposure, showing the redness of the almost-totally-eclipsed moon and the clouds that are covering it -- which are red not from moonlight but from sodium-vapor streetlights. There have been patchy clouds drifting past for the last hour, but as I write this five minutes later, it's now thickly overcast.


12:00am PST: Still overcast. I am pondering the symbolic darkness of midnight on the winter solstice in the middle of a lunar eclipse. There are too many artificial lights to ponder it properly -- with the cloud cover and all the streetlights, the sky is bizarrely bright -- but I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, all in all. So, have a picture of some appropriate-seeming artificial lights, on our Christmas tree.

12:20am PST: The overcast shows no signs of letting up, so I'm going to bed. Even though there are occasional thin spots, they're not thin enough to find the shadowed moon through. Goodnight, all!

Comments

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

It's overcast here. ;_;

[brooksmoses]

Here too, now. It cleared up for a while, but then the clouds covered it right at the moment of totality.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

We could never have seen more than the start of the eclipse, which was due shortly before dawn here, but as it turned out, the sky was totally overcast anyway.

I have seen a total eclipse of the moon before, however, and I remember that reddish tinge creeping across the moon's face. As we were miles from any street lights at the time, it was a genuine phenomenon of the eclipse and not due to artifical lighting.

[brooksmoses]

Yup -- the reddishness of the moon and the streetlight-induced orange-pinkness of the clouds were clearly distinct in person, but the camera wasn't picking up the difference particularly well. The tree, likewise, is not in fact really magenta-pink in the middle, even with all the red and blue and purple lights.

(I'll edit the post for a bit of clarity on what I meant to say about the cloud-color, too.)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing. We're under such thick cloud cover I couldn't even locate the moon.

[brooksmoses]

You're welcome!

[pameladean]

Oh, thank you for these! We were in the middle of a snowstorm, and there might just as well have never been a moon at all.

P.

[brooksmoses]

You're welcome!

[kightp.livejournal.com]

You know, if you cropped those a bit, I think they'd be better than you think they are. And I like that you got stars in that cloudy one - the clouds here were simply reflecting back too much light from the city, and i never did see the stars come out.

[brooksmoses]

Thanks! And, yup, they're not bad. If I crop the first three much more they'll be tiny, though; the versions of those that I posted are just cropped, not resized at all.

I like having the stars too. One of the really nice things about this camera is that it will pick up stars pretty well on its longer exposures. (This was a 15-second exposure, using the car roof in place of a tripod.) I was pleased at how the eclipse made it possible to get the moon and some stars in the same photo, too -- normally, if I expose enough to see the stars, a full moon will wash out a huge splotch of the photo.