Did You See The Lunar Eclipse?

We did!
We did!

Yes, we went out in the subfreezing temps tonight and watched it from just after the eclipse started until about 15 minutes after totality ended. This is one of the pics we took with one of our digital cameras. First time we’ve actually tried any astrophotography with them. I’d like to try attaching one to the telescope one of these times — that’ll take some practice, but hey… chip space is not at such a premium anymore, and if I don’t like an image in preview I can slay it and try again. Ah the wonders of modern photography!

Still, as an old film photographer, there’s just not quite the range of ” expression” from a digital camera that I got used to with film. Does the instant gratification make up for it? Well, yeah, in a way. I get to come in here and upload a photo within a few minutes of taking it, do a little cropping, and then voila! Here it is.

The moon did look a little reddish, although I’m not sure if it was quite THIS red. However, I didn’t want to mess with color balances on the image, so I left those alone and simply cropped some of the black away and centered the Moon. It was a great-lookin’ eclipse and very pretty against the starry sky! (Unfortunately in this exposure, the stars didn’t come through — I could expose for Moon or stars, but getting both in was a bit dodgier. Good news is that we didn’t have speck of cloud anywhere and we got to see a very pretty and awe-inspiring sight!

I hope you got a chance to see the lunar eclipse tonight. Write to me and let me know how the eclipse looked for you!