Lunartic.

I went out last night to view and photograph the lunar eclipse. The only other one I've ever seen was back in 2000, I think. That night was extremely cold. I got home from work a little after midnight and quickly set my camera up to get a few quick shots before totality was over. It was so cold that the shutter in my early 70's Yashica SLR froze open. I did manage to get one shot, but it was so badly exposed the moon looked like a white spot.

Thankfully it wasn't all that cold last night and I got to study the moon for about twenty minutes and get a dozen or more shots with my camera. I broke the old 70's camera a couple of years ago and replaced it with a new manual Nikon SLR. So, with decent equipment, OK weather, and plenty of time, I hope I got at least one good shot. I have several books on astrophotography, but they were annoying inexact on the amount of time I should expose the shot. It could be anywhere from one to twenty-five seconds. So I shot a lot pictures at different speeds.

The thing about the first lunar eclipse I saw that struck me as odd was how the darkened moon suddenly looked like a three-dimensional object rather than just a flat, bright disk. It looked like a reddish ball floating in the sky. Oddly, last night it didn't really seem to have that three-dimensional quality I remembered.

If any of the shots turn out half decent I'll post one and put up a link to it. Don't hold your breath waiting for a picture; I still have at least one exposed astrophotography roll that's been laying around since summer 2002.