Lunar Eclipse
In case you didn’t know, there was a total lunar eclipse this morning – at least in the western states. As I write this, it’s still on but the peak has passed. Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse can last for a long time.
So I took this photo about an hour ago:
I took many photos. Taking pictures at night can be tricky; never quite sure how they’re going to turn out until one gets a chance to look at them. This was far beyond an iPhone’s capability: a Nikon D800E, telephoto lens, 4.5f, exposures between 20 and 2 sec.
I wasn’t on the centerline so the shadow isn’t centered but close …
I went out and looked at 6:30 but nothing but clouds forever.
We’re looking at 2 weeks worth of mostly rain.
Rain is my least enjoyable weather.
In a little bit I have to go out in it and put 12 40lb bags of softener salt in the workshop that are sitting in the driveway right now. My back already hurts.
Lovely.
One of the best photographs of a Blood Moon that I have ever seen. Thank you for posting. I remember years ago a fellow by the name of John Hagee who was proclaiming the end was coming in 2014-2015 with those Blood Moons. Like a lot of things he preached, he was wrong. According to the net his worth is in the multiple millions and comes from his ministry. Just one of may warnings is “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” – Matthew 7:15
I’m attaching a photo of the moon that I took not long after it had risen the previous evening. I take these on my phone…a Samsung Galaxy S21FE…my phone’s camera will zoom in at 30x. This picture was taken right before sunset…6:22pm…but the background is dark because I’ve zoomed in so closely. In order to get the photo to post here, I upload it to Facebook, then download the Facebook image again. My original version of the image is too large for posting directly here, and the Facebook version fixes that problem.
I knew ahead of time that I wasn’t going to be up for the eclipse. That would have had me outside at around 4:30am, and sleep was a higher priority.
Since I’ve had this phone and figured out how to take these pictures, I must have taken 50 pictures of the moon. I can’t explain why it still fascinates me. The moon’s face is a constant for us. The moon rotates about it’s axis at the same frequency that it rotates around the earth. The moon that we see today is the same moon that we saw last month and the same moon that we’ll see next year.
For ghost….immediately after I took that picture of the moon, I turned around to the west and took another picture of the sky as it approached sunset. I saw the contrails and thought that I’d add that picture to our earlier discussion, but instead I dropped it.
That looks luvlay, and normal.
I guess I didn’t elaborate my point properly the other day. As I had said, the airport is not close so I don’t see many jets in the course of an average day. So I found it very unusual that on that particular day I counted 17 vapor trails.
When I was 10 we lived next to a big field that had some dairy cows. This was in rural Carlisle PA. Because there were 5 screamin’ kids in the fambly and I have always been a loner, I’d go way out in the field and lay down and stare at the clouds. Sometimes I’d see a jet. On rare occasions I’d see a Goodyear blimp. YAAAAY! (I don’t remember the last time I seen a blimp, been at least 4 or 5 decades now.)
When I’d see a jet with the long white smoke coming out the back I’d remember some stuff my dad had told me. He had been an airplane mechanic (C119 flying boxcars) in Japan in the late 40’s early 50’s and had to be jump (parachute) qualified. He told me that when a person falls through the air they will go up to 120 mph, or about 2 miles a minute. I knew a mile was 5280 ft. So when I’d see a jet about 5 miles up in the sky I’d think to myself, if someone fell out of that jet it would take them about 2 and a half minutes to hit the ground. Scary stuff for a little kid to be thinking about. Apparently not scary enough. About 9 years later I was jumping out of airplanes….
Whether you’re close to an airport has no bearing on why you might be seeing contrails.
From my driveway (where I took both my picture of the moon and the picture to the west of the sunset and contrails), I am just less than 20 miles from Sky Harbor (the airport in Phoenix). The planes that you can see in my picture (circled below) are low altitude…approaching their landings at PHX…and are not producing contrails. The contrails that you can see are being produced by planes at much higher altitudes….I’m guessing north of 35,000′. You see contrails when you’re under the high altitude airways….your proximity to an airport is mostly irrelevant.
There’s a lot of stuff buzzing around up there that aren’t on commercial flight paths.
Very true, and it happens all the time.
For those who don’t know, everything flown above 18,000′ feet in this country (It can be at other altitudes elsewhere.) has to be flown on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) flight plan. Among other things, the flight plan tells ATC the route that you plan to fly, the altitude that you intend to cruise at, and your destination. Prior to the flight, the ATC issues you your clearance for your planned route.
However, plans do change, for any number of reasons. In my attached image, let’s say that your planned route took you from Pontiac (lower left corner) to the northeast along J35 (the name of an airway) to Joliet and then Northbrook, turning there to J89 to Badger (just off the upper edge of the image).
But why would I want to overfly Northbrook? It’s shorter to cut off that dog leg. Once airborne and approaching Pontiac, why couldn’t I ask ATC for their clearance to go directly to Badger?
Doing that would place me not on an airway for that segment between Pontiac and Badger.
I’d wager that more flights are flown with one or more of these shortcuts than are not.
And again, this has nothing to do with your proximity to any airport.
A wonderful photo DT.
Thanks for posting it for those of us who can’t see it with our own eyes in real time.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. Couldn’t plan the post; didn’t know if I’d see it or get a picture. It’s just a shadow … but I find these kind of things interesting nonetheless. We’ve had cloudy skies recently (missed the 6-planet alignment a few nights ago) but it cleared up last night and 4AM wasn’t excessively early to get up to take photos. But by the time I was done, it was too late to go back to bed.
I understand there won’t be another until New Year’s Eve 2027/2028. That sounds so much longer than “The next total lunar eclipse will appear in about 22 months”