Eclipse!

Some of you heard we had a lunar eclipse Sunday night (20 Jan, 2019)... Of course it was hyped by the Internet to be the Super-Blood-Wolf Moon, as if just calling it a lunar eclipse wouldn't be as exciting! Well, you will get no embellishments here... Total lunar eclipses are always fun to look at, and lead once upon a time to my second published image - in the Des Moines Register no less, way back in 1975!

So I'm back in Arizona again, usually the bastion of clear blue skies, but in the week here the sun has only made rare appearances, and the forecast for eclipse evening was depressing to say the least! At least the high temperature that day was 79! It was perfectly clear at "Ketelsen East" should I have observed it from there, but the temperature at eclipse time was -5F! Blue sky and thin clouds thickened as sunset approached in Arizona, but always willing to take a chance, drove out to a dark-sky site that the Tucson astro club used to use a couple decades ago - Empire Ranch, about 40 miles SE of Tucson. I wasn't much interested in the partial phases, but sky looked to be mostly clear with only about half of the moon showing.


I set up my Polarie tracking mount - a simple tracker for camera-only use - no tracked telescopes for this eclipse. I did set up my big binoculars for a visual look occasionally. With the moon still partially lit by the sun, a 44-degree halo was apparent and I took a few shots of that before totality started. Totality finally came and while impressive visually, the slightest magnification showed the effects of thin clouds. The photo at left shows the view with a normal lens - the overexposed pink spot is the eclipsed moon, and M44, the Beehive Cluster is to its left and constellation Gemini above in a 30 second exposure. The thin clouds made the stars misty - showing the color differences more clearly. The two bright stars above the moon - Pollux, the lower, is cooler and more yellow than Castor, the upper one...


I tried a couple lens combinations, but again, the clouds made getting anything worthwhile difficult, so decided to stick with wide-angle lenses, finally choosing my relatively new-to-me Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, taking a 30 second exposure every 40 seconds... The exposure was perfect for showing the Winter Milky Way when the clouds parted enough to show it! And all the grand constellations - Orion, Gemini, rising Leo to the far left were visible, as well as the brightest star Sirius (other than the sun) to lower center, and the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus at upper right are evident. The yellow light glow are reflected from the cities of Sierra Vista to the lower left, and Nogales, AZ to lower right. I ended up with about 40 frames, extending from about 15 minutes before the end of totality to about 15 minutes afterwards, so decided to put them in a little time lapse using Moviemaker, after minimal processing of each frame. The 7 second loop was repeated 3 times, and the result was then uploaded to Youtube for you to look at here:





If you want any more than that wide-field view, please refer to the last eclipse visible from here, back in September of 2015! Like I said, you don't need to hype it any more than what it really is - a lunar eclipse! The next one fully visible across the country isn't until March of 2025 (some partly visible before then), so a good long wait for the next one to be high in the sky!