UPDATED – Video now available at the bottom of the post…
I love Eclipses. There’s something magical about them. Makes you really realize that we’re all just hanging here in space, with balls of rock floating around balls of buring gas. I can see why the ancient civilizations thought that the whole thing was a bad omen.
Anyway! For the first time in years, we had a lunar eclipse that I could actually see, without clouds stubbornly sitting there in-between. I Managed to finally do something that I’ve been trying to for ages – take a series of shots which illustrates the eclipse. The fruits of this (cold) night can be seen below. Each of the ‘natural’ looking shots (the first 20) were taken with a 500mm zoom, at F6.2(I think!) and 1/500 sec shutter speed (a few seem darker because of thin cloud passing in front of the moon). From there on in, I took 1-2 sec exposures to expose the ‘dark’ moon, which, as you can see, is not totally black, but a gorgeous red colour, a result of the light being scattered and reflected onto the moon’s surface from the Earth’s atmosphere. A full explanation of how all this happens can be found on Wikipedia…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse
I wanted to stay out and complete the series (right through to the complete re-exposure of the moon), but the cold, and the persistant and increasing cloud cover made me decide to be happy with what I had, and head inside to crop them all and make this post. Cropping is the only processing I’ve done to these shots. The whole sequence was taken in about 1 3/4 hours, from 9:30pm until around 11:15pm.
Anyway – Enjoy them, and click the thumbnails for a full view of each!
And (thanks to EvilDragon of gp2x.de), the Video (converted to Video from the above frames)!
You can also download a high-quality, and bigger, XviD excoded version from the link below:-