Total Eclipse of my back yard

zman — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:26:00 GMT

Just in case you missed it there was a lunar eclipse at the end of August 2007 and the Pacific Northwest was in a perfect place to see it. Well if you were prepared to stay up till 3:30am to see it hit mid eclipse (after that its just a rerun of the first half!).

I've only ever seen a lunar eclipse once in 1996 and I wasn't even expecting it - I went into a Home Depot and it was fairly bright and when I came out the moon was a very odd color - so I decided to stay up and watch this one. The sky was, surprisingly, clear and we had a great view from my back deck. The moon was full and bright enough to be casting shadows and the difference in darkness at the peak was huge. We had a borrowed telescope which helped see the detail, though it was almost too bright to look at when it was full. I can completely relate to people from hundreds or thousands of years ago freaking out when this happened. Can you imagine the power of the guy who worked this out and could start to predict them (and now I think of that I seem to remember it was a plot point in The Spaceman and King Arthur which was a favourite film of mine as a kid (and amazingly I now find seems to be based on a Mark Twain published story from 1889 called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)). It got a little chilly but it was very worthwhile staying up to see it. I did learn that the moon moves a long way in 15 minutes if you are trying to track it with the telescope. Maybe one day when I am a millionaire I will buy one of those fancy motorized ones.

Photography was going to be a problem - I'm a big fan of cameras that fit in my pocket which means I stand no chance of getting good pictures unlike some of my friends who need a small car to transport all of their equipment ;-) I probably took about 50 pictures most of which were about as bad as you can imagine. At one point I had the bright idea of pressing my small camera over the telescope eye piece - on the small screen it was hard to see quality so I took lots of pictures, with lots of settings and worked on the theory that I could just show the ones that worked out and just to surprise me - a couple actually look pretty good. Check out the set on flickr.

Now I have to work out how and when I can see a total solar eclipse - plan your vacations from NASA's solar eclipse page.

Zman's Diary : eclipse

Total Eclipse of my back yard