Tag: Lunar Eclipse

Total Lunar Eclipse of November 2022

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Total Lunar eclipse of 08 November 2022.
Total Lunar eclipse of 08 November 2022.

I hope you got to experience the total lunar eclipse that occurred 08 November 2022. I’m really glad we were able to see this since the next total lunar eclipse is not until 14 March 2025. This was also the second total lunar eclipse of the year but that previous one was attended by mostly cloudy skies and we only got a few glimpses of the Moon. This one was so much better!

Lunar eclipse at maximum totality. Th planet Uranus is also visible in the upper portion of the image.
Lunar eclipse at maximum totality. Th planet Uranus is also visible in the upper portion of the image.

But it wasn’t entirely certain that we would be able to see the event. There were clouds during the afternoon and evening. When I looked outside at midnight there were bands of high clouds stretching across the sky. But I was more than willing to take a chance and drive to a location in Sedona with very dark skies and warmer temperatures than we had in Flagstaff.

The high clouds continued during the beginning of the partial eclipse (U1) but we could see gaps appearing in the clouds and we ended up with mostly clear skies by the time the Moon was about one half darkened. Totality (U2 through U3) occurred during clear skies and there were only a few patches of high clouds during the final partial stages.

I was using a Nikon D750 and my legacy Nikon 80–200mm ƒ/4 AI-S manual focus lens. It has a hard stop at infinity which makes it very easy to focus in dark conditions. Just rotate the barrel until it stops. Done. It’s also a sharp lens especially when using it at ƒ/8. The camera was mounted on an iOptron Skytracker. This way I could keep the Moon near the middle of the frame and the only motion would be the eastward movement of the Moon against the background of the stars.

The Moon was close in the sky to the planet Uranus making for a more interesting setup. The eclipse last year was near Pleiades—that was really fun to photograph—but it was not quite a total eclipse.

The photograph at the top shows the Moon at various stages from beginning, mid partial, beginning of totality, mid totality, end of totality, mid partial, and the end.  The next photograph shows the Moon during maximum totality along with Uranus. And, finally, there is a time-lapse video of the event.

Time lapse of the eclipse.

Previous eclipses discussed on this site: November 2021; May 2022

Finally, pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about eclipses can be found here:  https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEcat5/figure.html

Lunar Eclipse of 18–19 November 2021

The Lunar eclipse of 18–19 November was considered a “partial eclipse” but with 97% coverage it was pretty close to a total eclipse. But not quite. That last 3% of the illuminated limb of the Moon was enough to make photography a challenge because its brightness significantly overwhelmed the dim red of the remainder of the lunar disk as well as the nearby stars.

Lunar eclipse with the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters.
Lunar eclipse with the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters.
Lunar eclipse.
Lunar eclipse.

What made this eclipse noteworthy is the proximity of the Moon to both the Pleiades (M45) and Hyades star clusters.

I used an Nikon 80–200mm telephoto zoom lens for this astrophotography session. Set to 200mm it was possible to capture (barely) both the Moon and Pleiades. Set to 80mm it was easy to capture all three objects. This legacy lens from Nikon is still a very useful astrophotography lens for me—not least because it has a hard stop at infinity making nighttime focusing simple.

Complicating the setup—and there’s always a complication—was the presence of high, thin clouds streaming across the sky. These clouds muted the brilliance of the stars but also created an illuminated area surrounding the Moon. To capture both the bright uneclipsed sliver of the Moon as well as the nebulosity in the Pleiades required shooting a variety of exposures that could be blended later. Even this was not as easy as I had hoped and I tried different methods (e.g., layers with masks; high dynamic range blending; dodging and burning, etc.) until I was finally satisfied with a good but less than stellar (get it? stellar?) image.

Here are two images. The zoomed in and highly cropped image was shot at ISO 800, ƒ/8, and 4 seconds at a focal length of 200mm. The wider field of view was shot at 80mm, ISO 800, ƒ/8, and at shutter speeds of ½, 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, and 30 seconds. HDR blending was done using Lightroom 6 and then further tweaked using various tools to brighten the stars while keeping the Moon dark.

Total Lunar Eclipse and Overcast Skies

I have had the total lunar eclipse of 26 May 2021 on my calendar for almost a year. So when the date was getting close and the weather forecasts were calling for mostly cloudy skies I was disappointed.

Lunar Eclipse of 26 May 2021 and the Moon is starting to reappear from Earth's shadow.
Lunar Eclipse of 26 May 2021 and the Moon is starting to reappear from Earth’s shadow.
The partially eclipsed Moon is about to set behind Cathedral Rock.
The partially eclipsed Moon is about to set behind Cathedral Rock.

Late in the previous afternoon the high clouds began to move across the southwest. As the day progressed, the clouds became thicker. But it was not a solid mass of clouds; there were some areas of thinner clouds and even a few areas without clouds. So the plan was to be ready to shoot photographs if breaks in the clouds arrived in time.

I had a brief glimpse of the Moon just as the partial eclipse began and then the clouds totally obscured the Moon. We patiently waited for breaks or gaps and hoped to see the Moon during totality. Never happened.

IR satellite image at time of totality. Yep, totally overcast.
IR satellite image at time of totality. Yep, totally overcast.

The sky was brightening in the east as twilight arrived. Suddenly, I was able to see the Moon as it dropped close to the horizon where there was a gap in the clouds. For just a few minutes I could see the thin crescent of the lit portion and much of the larger portion that was still in shadow. A few minutes later it dropped below the horizon.

I was pretty happy to snatch this minor victory from what had seemed to be a defeat due to weather!

Next up: the conjunction of the planets Venus and Mercury in the evening sky on 28 May 2021. The forecast looks good.

Lunar Eclipse Through the Clouds

I have been looking forward to the recent Lunar eclipse (20 January 2019) since, well, the last one actually. During that eclipse, I shot images every three minutes while using an equatorial mount to track along with the stars. The results were good but there was some room for improvement. And that’s why I was looking forward to this event.

Lunar eclipse of 20 January 2019.
Lunar eclipse of 20 January 2019.

The weather had different plans for me. A stream of high-level tropical moisture was sitting right over Arizona all that day and most of the night. By late afternoon, the clouds were thick enough to partially obscure the sun. How was a darkened Moon going to shine through those clouds?

I could have just given up and stayed home but I was determined to at least try. I drove to Sedona to set up. Not because Sedona is a better place for viewing than Flagstaff but because Sedona is about 15 degrees warmer. And that matters.

I set up the tripod and then roughly aligned the iOptron Skytracker to where I made my best guess of the location of the star Polaris. Just as the umbral phase of the eclipse began, I was able to barely see Polaris through the thin clouds and completed the alignment of the tracker.

One of the things I learned last year was that three minutes was too large a time gap to make a smooth time-lapse video. My plan for this eclipse was to shoot at 1-minute intervals. But with the high clouds I realized that any time-lapse video was going to be challenging. So…3-minute intervals again. The clouds varied between fairly thick and mostly obscuring the moon to occasionally very thin allowing some lunar detail to be seen.

Satellite image showing extensive clouds during the Lunar eclipse.
Satellite image showing extensive clouds during the Lunar eclipse.

Here is a satellite image from GOES-16 showing the incredible stream of clouds moving across Arizona. I’m amazed that I got any photos at all!

An Early Morning Lunar Eclipse

It was worth it.

Getting up early in the morning, driving to a location with a good western view, and then standing around for many hours taking photos of the lunar eclipse.

Yes, it was worth it. But I was very cold by the time it was over.

Four stages of the total lunar eclipse of 31 January 2018.
Four stages of the total lunar eclipse of 31 January 2018.

This lunar eclipse has been referred to as the “Super Blue Blood Moon” eclipse. What does that even mean? Okay—here is an informative article written by an astronomer on how these terms came to be part of our jargon for this eclipse.

Anyway…

I had considered many possibilities how to photograph the lunar eclipse including interesting foregrounds, multiple exposures, and even video. Some examples of single and multiple images can be found in this blog for 2014 and 2015 eclipses taken during the recent Lunar Eclipse Tetrad of 2014-2015. A tetrad is a series of four consecutive total eclipses occurring at approximately six month intervals. It’s now been a bit more than two years since the last lunar eclipse visible around here and I was ready for another.

Start of totality.
Start of totality.

Eventually I decided to try something a bit different from previous events. I would mount the camera on the iOptron SkyTracker so that the camera would follow the stars. From these images, I would construct a time-lapse of the eclipse as it went through its different phases. With the SkyTracker, the stars would remain fixed while the moon would slowly move across the sky relative to the stars—and the Earth’s shadow.

Mid-totality of Lunar Eclipse.
Mid-totality of Lunar Eclipse.

It worked pretty well but I did manage to bump the camera a few times as I was changing exposure settings. I had considered using a phone application that could change the settings on the camera so I would not have to touch it—but the power drain when WiFi was active was unacceptable. I would probably need to change the battery during the eclipse—which put me right back in the same situation of jostling the camera. Okay—just keep it simple. No WiFi, adjust by hand, and be careful.

The image at the top of this entry is a composite of four stages of the eclipse. P1 is the first stage when the Moon enters the Penumbral shadow of the Earth. Only a subtle darkening occurs during this stage. U1 occurs when the Moon first enters the umbral shadow and the darkening along one edge is very distinct. U2 is the beginning of totality. Mid-totality is the darkest stage of the eclipse.

The second image shows the start of totality. There is a brief period near the start and end of totality in which the limb of the moon can have a bluish cast to it. Lunar eclipse researcher Rich Keen says:

“Most of the light illuminating the Moon passes through the stratosphere, and is reddened by scattering. However, light passing through the upper stratosphere penetrates the ozone layer, which absorbs red light and actually makes the passing light ray bluer.”

This can be seen as a turquoise-blue fringe around the red. And here we have an image taken just a few minutes after totality began that shows some blue along the lower limb.

A few minutes after totality ended---and a few minutes before moonset.
A few minutes after totality ended—and a few minutes before moonset.

Stages P1, U1, U2, and mid-totality were all visible with a very dark sky. U3 (end of totality) occurred during morning twilight; U4 and P2 both occurred after Moonset.

The time-lapse sequence was shot with 3-minute intervals. This is a good interval if you want to composite images as the moon has moved a full diameter plus a bit more in three minutes so that individual frames do not overlap. Three minutes, however, is too long a time for a smooth time lapse. Lesson learned for the next event!

The animation of the eclipse starts at P1 and ends just as the moon sets. The exposure was changed during totality and stars become visible. Later, twilight brightens the entire sky and, at the end, the distant mountains can be seen as the moon sets in the west.

 

The next total Lunar Eclipse will occur 27 July 2018 but will not be visible from any part of North America. The next North American total lunar eclipse will occur on 21 January 2019.

Edit: corrected dates.