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!!

Okay, so it’s freezing cold here, but the sky has been remarkably clear tonight. So we went out to look at the eclipse. It’s beautiful, and as I write this, the Moon is moving out of totality. It’s still a pretty brick-red color and as it moves out of the shadow, that color will fade over the next hour. Now, I’m sure that there are lots of really decent astrophotographers out there who will be posting their stunning images of the event.I am not one of those astrophotographers, but I was still bitten by the camera bug and decided to see what my little HP Photosmart could do. So, I attached it to a little $9.00 hiker’s tripod I bought on ThinkGeek.com a while back, and set the camera for no flash, biggest zoom, and high resolution. This is the result.

Not stunning, but hey, it does show that if I can come up with an image of the Moon that isn’t TOO blurry (given the long exposure, etc.), then anybody with a little camera and a little tripod can do it, too. Just the same, be sure and do some searching on the Web over the next few days for “lunar eclipse photos” to see what the folks with the big cameras can do!