That’s what meteorologists rely on, you know…
We’ve had rain and overcast for three days straight, with the same thing predicted for the next week. Seriously. I looked at the skies a few times over, just in case we’d get a break in the clouds sometime during the total lunar eclipse, but nothing even slightly promising. So I went to bed early.
Woke up, rolled over, and caught bright light streaming past the blind. Grabbed my watch – 1:01 AM EDT. The eclipse was to completely end at 1:12 AM EDT, meaning the moon had fully left the Earth’s penumbra. This pic was taken at 1:11.51 AM, a whopping nine seconds before this occurred.
Not like that actually means anything. Aside from how far off the camera clock might be from locally-altered GMT/Zulu time, the penumbra is the barest hint of shadow, hardly discernible from anything else – it’s the umbra that starts showing the missing chunk. I was shooting through a thin layer of humidity anyway, which would actually darken the moon more than the penumbra except for somewhere around full penetration. At some point I may be back with an animated gif (pronounced “geh-FILL-tah”) showing the wisps blowing past, but right now I’m racing to beat up the already-written-and-scheduled Monday color post and its comments therein, just for perversity’s sake.
The frame above, by the way, is tightly cropped, and slightly less than full resolution. This one, the same image, shows exactly how big the moon appears in the frame at 453mm focal length, just so you know what kind of magnification it takes for moon photos. For exposure details, 1/100 second at f11, ISO 100 – the typical exposure for full moon shots, provided that it’s not faintly dimmed by haze (basically, at f11, shutter speed should be 1/ISO, what’s often called, “Moony 11”.) A stop or so brighter would have been better, given the glow easily visible around it when observed.