Blood Moon

It’s been too long since I posted here, and so I have some catching up to do. I’ll start with the popular event that happened last month, the total lunar eclipse. It was called a “Blood Moon”, because it appeared quite red. This is caused by some light still reaching the Moon through Earth’s atmosphere. And since the atmosphere scatters blue (and some green) light, which is why appears blue to us during daylight, only the red and orange parts make it through to the Moon.

It was on a Sunday night, so we didn’t want to attend one of the various watch events happening around town; instead, we just had a little private watch party with our neighbours.

At first, it looked like the clouds would ruin the show, but they cleared just in time. We got some very nice views, and took a few videos and photos.

Clouds reveal the Blood Moon. View through my little 65mm refractor.

Our little watch party on our water and observation tower.

Stacked image taken and edited with the AstroShader app on iPhone 12 Pro. 262 sub-exposures at 0.324s, ISO 1300. With stars in the background. Looking at it live, I found it particularly nice to see the Moon embedded in stars like this; normally, the Moon is too blindingly bright to see many stars around it when looking at it through a telescope.

A close look at higher magnification with my 150mm Newtonian. Also taken with the AstroShader app, 1000 sub-exposures at 0.51s, ISO 2953. This picture was taken over a longer total time that the previous one, and the telescope was tracking the Moon, which moves at a slightly different speed through the sky than stars do. Therefore, the surrounding stars moved some distance relative to the Moon during the imaging time, and appear as streaks.

Timelapse of sunlight coming back to the Moon.

It was a truly magical experience, even for me, as someone who’s usually interested much more in deep sky objects than the Moon.

Now I just need to get to properly see a total solar eclipse. The one occasion where I experienced one was in 1999 in Germany — but it was cloudy. In August 2027, there will be one passing right over Luxor, Egypt. See you all there, I hope 🙂

Clear skies

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Blood Moon

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