The Blood Moon

As most of you probably know, we had a total lunar eclipse this morning.  They call it a blood moon because it turned reddish orange due to the light refracting around the earth’s atmosphere to illuminate the moon.  As several commentators poetically put it, it’s like all of earth’s sunrises and sunsets illuminating the moon at the same time.Anyway, Ann and I thought we’d try to take advantage of the opportunity to see it and possibly photograph it.  Actually, the timing wasn’t too bad for us on the Pacific Coast given that Ann gets up at 4:00 anyway.  The total eclipse ran from about 3:27 to 4:25 our time, so we got up at 3 and were out the door by 3:20.  My quick look out the window saw the eclipse about half-way across the moon and clear, starry skies (our last effort at an eclipse was a bust with clouds).

We had scouted several sites the night before, deciding we wanted to stay very close to home, and found two near-by locations that we thought we could hit in one hour (we did, just barely).  The first one was where we used to walk the dogs down by the indoor swimming pool.  The place has a lot of deciduous trees that we thought might help make a more interesting photograph than the moon.  Well, we pulled up and wound up chasing several deer away from the area we wanted to make photographs.

We watched it make that final transition into the full eclipse and then started photographing, pausing occasionally just to watch the beauty of it all.  Ann then suggested that we go to our second location, so we hurried to a near-by park on the McKenzie River.

It was a lot darker there and my first images were pretty bad.  Ann then suggested I use my heavy-duty flashlight to illuminate the trees across the river (yes, it’s that bright and we bought it for just that use; Ann had another one that is a bit less powerful).  Wow, that helped a lot and saved me from some really boring images.

The point of this blog post isn’t the images, because they’re pretty mediocre.  They were first-effort, wing-it photos that really were experiments.  I think of today’s shooting as a learning experience at best.    

What this post is really about is that basically photography was the excuse for us to experience the eclipse and to pay attention to it.  Sure, no one needs an excuse to witness a lunar eclipse, but saying you’re going to make photographs of it (no matter how mediocre), will, for me at least, ensure I will get my butt out of bed at 3:00 to do it.  And most important of all, the photography really isn’t really the point of getting up - experiencing the eclipse is.  While the photographs aren’t fantastic, having seen the moon’s transition (from the view just after waking waking, seeing/photographing, and looking at the partial eclipse as it was ending while driving Ann to work) was amazing.  Photographing was just part of the experience.

So if you missed this lunar eclipse, there should be another one in the next year or two.  May you have clear skies that night and drag yourself out of bed.