A “total” lunar eclipse occurred right on schedule this morning as I was rolling into work at 5 a.m.! A small part of the moon was covered by the Earth’s shadow as I set up the camera tripods on the catwalk of the Van Nuys Airport control tower. A bunch of nuisance cirrus clouds was causing consternation—it was thick enough to badly blur the moon on occasion. But, fortunately, it was not too much of an issue when the eclipse was near totality, and when the orange colors were most prominent, and before the light of dawn was too bright. The best images were taken about an hour before sunrise (around 6 a.m.). As the eclipsed moon continued to descend towards the Simi Hills on the west side of Chatsworth and West Hills, the light of dawn increased rapidly and the orange moon glow vanished. And, soon after, cirrus was totally blocking the moon and I couldn’t even see it! It would have been cool to see the eclipsed moon sitting right on top of the Simi Hills, but the clouds interfered. Naturally, the cirrus was nowhere near the western horizon an hour later. The wind was calm and the temperature was 39F this morning.
Below are a bunch of images to give you a good sense of what I observed between about 5:15 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. Sunrise was at about 6:50 a.m. Most of the moon images are with the 70-200mm lens, with the Canon 5D. A few are with the Canon 40D, which has the 1.6X conversion factor and makes the 200mm setting the equivalent of a 320mm setting. Still, even at full zoom, quite a bit of cropping was necessary in editing to “blow up” the moon image to a decent size. Check out the medium-bright star very close to the moon, at about 8 o’clock position.
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