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

[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!