An Eclipse Being Eclipsed by a Mountain

from Astronomy Picture of the Day, March 1, 2008

by Alex Mukensnable

If you aren’t reading Astronomy Picture of the Day every day, you should be. It’s one of my daily stops and it never fails to reward me with a great view of something cool in the cosmos. The image above is the March 1, 2008 entry, and it features a beautiful image of the eclipsed Moon rising through the shadow of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i on February 20, 2008. It’s stunning and reminds me of the view I saw each morning when I was doing an observing run on Mauna Kea back in 1996. We’d see the shadow of Mauna Kea off to the west, created by the rising Sun in the east. Seeing a shadowed eclipse like this is truly amazing.

Alex Mukensnable has published a stunning time-lapse of the eclipse as seen from Hawai’i (which missed totality due to the fact that the islands were too far west of the zone of totality). This image is a still from that film, which you can see here. Enjoy!!