Saturday, April 27, 2013

Partial Eclipse of the Moon

On Thursday night, we had a very lovely moonrise:

But there was still another show in the starting blocks - a partial eclipse of the moon. I admit, as lunar eclipses go it wasn't super impressive - the moon was only for about 2% of it's surface in the Earth's umbra - but as the weather was so nice, I still took a couple of pictures.
The series below was taken between 21:12 and 22:53, one shot roughly every 10 minutes. I used fixed apperture (5.6) and exposure length (1/800) for all pictures.
I plugged the pictures into Photoshop and enventually managed to create this composite.
You can just about see the umbra scraping along the upper edge of the moon.

By the way, did you know that the fact that the Earth's shadow shows up as a circle on the moon (when you have a bit larger coverage of course), was, among other things they observed, proof already for Plato and Aristoteles that the Earth was a sphere.

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