About Last Night…

The first lunar eclipse to occur on the winter solstice occurred.  It’s the first time it’s happened in 600 years…and apparently won’t happen again for another 400 years.  I had two strokes of luck with this amazing astronomical event:

#1 – the path of the moon tracked almost directly over my house!  Literally!  I took maybe ten steps out my front door, and there it was, beautifully tracking across the sky.

#2 – Let me re-phrase that…beautifully tracking across the cloudy sky. 

At first it was just a few wisps…I started to capture a few shots at 10.  You know, to sort of document the before, during, and after.  But, by 10:30 the wisps were sticky patches of cloud cover.  By 11, even my naked eye could not discern any detail anymore.  It was very disappointing…

So, I put the camera away, began this post and went back out to glance at the sky for a bit before bed.  And as the first yawn escaped my tired body, sure enough, the clouds began to peel away.  At the halfway point, I finally grumbingly ran inside, bundled up, and grabbed the camera/tripod set which were already in place.  I’ve not done much post production on these, but here’s a select few:

I am sure others will get wonderful views, and the folks at NASA, Roswell, SETI, and all the others will document it quite nicely for the rest of us. But…it’s just not the same as viewing it in real time.  When all was said and done, I was glad I stayed up to watch it.  Not only did I end up getting some nice shots, but I got to see almost the whole thing before heading off to bed.

What about others?  Did anyone else stay up to watch it?  I’ll bet some pretty cool time lapse productions come out of this!  Share your own thoughts and perspectives in the comments.  Would love to hear from you!  Happy shooting, and I’ll likely have a full set posted tomorrow.

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