Blood Moon

This is one of my shots from the lunar eclipse on October 8, 2014. Shot at 04:04, so right at the tail end of totality (you can see brightening on the upper right). Shot with a 500mm f4.5 0.8seconds. I used this crop because my exposure also captured 3 other objects, probably stars.If it is clear here tomorrow night I will try and shoot it again. I am also going to get my telescope out try some shots with it.

Interesting, but of course, solar and lunar eclipses always occur in close proximity, almost exactly 2 weeks apart. First a solar eclipse during a new moon and then a lunar eclipse during the next full moon.

Are you just saying this or do you actually have a list of total lunar eclipses and Jewish holidays that you are comparing? Or are there just so many Jewish holidays that there will always be one when there is an eclipse?I assume when you say occur on Jewish holidays you mean the exact same day, not the same week, or month?ABE: I see Dwise1 already answered this.Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

One of the things I read this morning is that the April 4, 2015 lunar eclipse was only total for 4.5 minutes, but someone recalculated it and it was not actually total at all, so this was not a tetrad. It seems like splitting hairs a bit, to me.

Lunar eclipses look the same wherever they are visible. To see a solar eclipse you have to be in the path of the shadow cast by the moon on the earth.The last 3 blood moons were Dec. 21, 2010, Jun. 15, 2011, and Dec. 10, 2011. Nope, in fact the eclipse tonight will already be started when the moon rises, when viewed from where I am.

I have always been a bit of an eclipse freak. I was on a mountain top near Richland, WA on Feb 26, 1979 during the total solar eclipse. It was colder than hell and foggy and we didn't think we were going to see it. About 1 minute before totality the clouds opened up and there it was with a rainbow ring around it from the fog. 2 minutes and 17 seconds of absolutely amazing experience. I shot 2 rolls of film through my Questar telescope. None of them were that great and the corona was not a spectacular one, but I would not trade that experience for anything. One other observation was that it looked like a 360-degree sunset around us because we were high enough to see the sun shining outside the shadow.My wife also got some great shots with a normal lens of all the other people around us in the fog with the eclipse above them. I like her shots better than mine.I will have another chance on August 21, 2017 when the path of totality is right across the middle of Oregon.

Yesterday afternoon I found a truck stop parking lot a couple miles from home that looked like a spot to watch the eclipse. Later I set up 2 cameras with long lenses to shoot some photos.This is the eastern horizon at 19:04 pdt. Note the pinkish band of smoke. I'm thinking this will be a problem......The white arrow is where I calculated the moon would appear. The red arrow is where the moon was when I actually first spotted it. It was so close in tone (level of brightness) to the sky that it was almost invisible. This is the size the moon appears on my sensor. While I was first setting up my cameras and lenses, a woman drove up and asked if I was going to watch the eclipse. I said yes and she got out and said she had driven down from Portland to watch it. Over the course of the eclipse, 30 or 40 cars parked nearby and people got out and stood and waited and then watched for a while once it was visible. Most of them came over and spoke to me, I guess because I was the only one with lenses set up. I let some look through my camera, but it was set too high for some. They could see the shots I was getting on the camera LCD screen. I spent about an hour talking mostly to one guy from Alabama as I was snapping shots. The truckstop was right off the freeway and quite a few people said they were just passing by and wanted stop and find a place to watch. Oddly, no one said they were from around here.I do not think they were quite as sharp as the ones from last October, but this eclipse was redder. I was disappointed that one of my setups did not work well. I had never mounted that lens on a digital camera before so I need to practice with it and experiment a bit. It should capture sharper images plus fill the frame.ABE: This was shot with a Nikon D700 camera, Century Precision Optics 500mm f4.5 lens, ISO=1600, f8 @1.6sec.Photos of the moon during eclipses are much softer than can be achieved normally. I think I will try a few shots of the moon tonight.Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

I fiddled with my Questar and managed to get some pretty good shots of tonight's almost-full moon. So, I'm ready for the next blood moon.

A shot of the sun this afternoon. Several sunspots are visible. OK, I'm done.