Super Blue Lunar Eclipse

Living here in the USA, things have been a bit surreal over the past year.  As the Great Orange One (GOO) that occupies the office reserved for President has done his best to divide our citizenry and alienate us from the rest of the conscious world, it is sometimes difficult to remain optimistic about our future.  Fortunately, there are events that remind us of our place in the universe; and despite the deep divisions that are being cultivated by the GOO, there are greater forces at work that serve to unite us here on Earth.  There is something about seeing the solar system in motion in a way that we do not witness frequently, that seems to recharge my desire to make the world a better place.

Early this morning we were treated to a widely publicized total Lunar Eclipse.  This eclipse occurred on the second full moon within a calendar month (a "Blue" moon), and also at the time of perigee, when the moon is at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth (the "Super" moon).  The occurrence of a "Super Blue Lunar Eclipse" is indeed rare, with the last one occurring in 1866, one hundred and fifty two years ago! I observed the eclipse from work, (The Mount Lemmon SkyCenter) where we were providing a live stream of the eclipse for NASA.

The image at left was taken with my Canon 6D and a 70-200mm lens set to 100mm, just before sunrise.  You can see the eclipsed moon hanging in the dawn sky with Picacho peak in the distance at lower right (along with I-10 traffic just in front of it).



Below is a collage of some of the images I captured during the eclipse, using my Canon 6D and my Stellarvue 90mm refractor.  Remember to click to enlarge (perhaps twice if your browser automatically resizes images to fit the window)

So you missed the eclipse and are wondering when the next lunar eclipse is here in AZ? The next eclipse in Tucson will be on January 20, 2019 starting at 7:36 PM local time.

Finally, my friend Roger who observed and photographed the eclipse with me, had a little fun with my image above...

Lunar Eclipse

By now, there have been many images of the Total Lunar Eclipse this past Sunday circulating around the internet.  I was leading a public eclipse observing group of about 75 folks so taking pictures was not my primary objective for the evening...yet, I did try and capture some between talking about the eclipse, debunking the "blood moon" nonsense, and generally just enjoying the warm fall evening.

Two images below, one of the partial phase prior to totality, and one image from near totality.  These were taken with my Canon 6D and a 70-200mm f/4 set to 200mm with a 1.4 extender.  There was a slight breeze and I wish I had more time to play with the camera as I would have set the ISO a bit higher in order to capture images a bit faster (resulting in sharper images).   As things were, the images near totality was a 2 second exposure.

Partial Solar Eclipse

Last Thursday we witnessed a partial solar eclipse of the Sun- and for some reason this particular eclipse did not grab the attention of the media the way that the past few have.  It seemed that there were far more stories in the popular media for the lunar eclipse a couple weeks ago than for this event, despite the lunar eclipse happening in the middle of the night and the solar eclipse happening in mid-afternoon.  I was up at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter with my colleagues (we streamed the eclipse live) and took the opportunity to take some images of the eclipse of my own.

I was using my Stellarvue 90mm triplet refractor with a Lunt Solar Systems Herschel Prism and my Canon T2i.  All the images were taken at 1/4000 of a second, ISO 100 and were shot in raw format.  I was shooting at a very high shutter speed in order to try and minimize the effects of atmospheric turbulence in my images.  I later used photoshop to increase the exposure value and stretch the contrast of the images.  Overall, the seeing conditions ranged from good to spectacular during the first part of the eclipse, but as mid-eclipse approached the conditions deteriorated slightly.  Below are a few of the best images that I captured, and as always, click to enlarge.

Start of Eclipse

Sharpest of my images, quite happy with this one!

Near greatest eclipse

A nice view after maximum eclipse, atmosphere not as stable

EDIT: The large sunspot region on the face of the Sun during the eclipse, Active Region 12192, has produced (as of yesterday) 9 X-class flares and is obviously quite large.  "How large" you are wondering?...well the blog of the SDO mission has published an interesting post comparing AR 12192 to previous spots.  If you look at the graph they provide you will see that this is the largest spot region (by area) in the past two solar cycles!  They report that it is the 33rd largest on record, and within the top .01% of all spots.  Pretty impressive stuff!

We were rather lucky to have this spot during the eclipse, and even luckier that it was in the Sun's southern hemisphere and not eclipsed by the moon, making for some pretty pictures.  Looking forward to the August 2017 Total Eclipse!