Moon struck

I have only a pretty good camera. My lens zooms to only 135 millimeters, which is just about nothing when we're talking about the distance to the moon. And my knowledge of shooting the night sky is limited. Nonetheless, I wanted to try photographing the lunar eclipse. I got my gear ready and set the alarm.

Above is a full frame reduced to fit on this blog. The moon is far from filling the picture. Those big sexy moon photos are taken through telescopes, not lenses like mine.

Here's the same photo at actual size, cropped to fit the blog. It's a lot better than it looked on the camera screen, a lot better than I expected.

A little later. By itself, this just looks like any partial moon during the lunar cycle, not particularly "eclipsey." That's the problem with still shots.

So here we are, almost at the "blood moon" moment of total eclipse. I waited longer for there to be no sliver of white, but I don't think it ever went away. It just seemed to move counterclockwise around to the other side. Or maybe I was just cold and tired and wanted to call it a night/early morning. You can see how the image degrades as my camera tries to get enough light.

Watching it happen in real life was better than anyone's photos, though. I became aware of the movement of the planet I was standing on, the moon, the sun, the stars... everything. Wow. As they used to say, "Cosmic, man."