Here in rural west Michigan (between Lake Michigan and Grand Rapids, very little light pollution), it’s right now pretty stunning. At about 10:30, I took my dog out and the moon was lighting up the snow in the backyard like our flood light was on; no sign of an eclipse. Took one of the kids out at 11:20, and the moon was half covered. Just looked out a minute ago and the backyard is as black as, well, night. The moon itself is 90% shaded red and the top tenth is a little gray. We can normally see a lot of stars where we’re at on a dark night, but the stars are amazingly vivid tonight.
This is the most vivid and amazing lunar eclipse that I’ve seen, maybe ever. Wish it wasn’t so dagburned cold. I can’t be out there for more than a few minutes at a time.
It’s the dagburned cold that is knocking all the humidity down. Around here there are 1/4 million people about 25 miles away and I get no light reflection from the sky in that direction. Usually a white glow is all I see that way.
Of course, cloud cover rolled in on my part of Chicago, so I could barely see the thing at all. Oh well. Evening started out completely clear, and then started clouding up right before the eclipse. Clouds were thin and low to start, so you could make it out (although it didn’t look red at all to me) in patches, and now a full stratus cloud cover is over me.
That said, I did see plenty of lunar eclipses growing up, but all from light-polluted Chicago. It would be nice to see it somewhere with little light pollution to get the full effect. I’ve always been a bit let down by lunar eclipses. (Total solar ones, though, two of the coolest natural phenomena experiences of my life.)
I know, right? It’s always cloudy or raining here whenever there’s something neat in the sky. (The recent solar eclipse was clear, but it was Summer.) I never get to see the meteor showers. We’re quite fortunate that the clouds cleared out of the Pacific NorthWet temporarily.
It’s amazing how the shadow adds dimension to the moon. It really looks like a sphere up there. I can see how this would totally freak out primitive folks.
I walked outside coincidentally right around the peak of totality and, well, I didn’t get an enormous amount of enjoyment out of looking at a dark thing in a dark sky. It was tough to appreciate whatever colors were supposed to be there. I tried again about 45 minutes later when at least part of the moon was shining though, and that was kind of neat. I gave things one more try after the eclipse was over, and I thought the supermoon was legitimately cool.
I went to bead early and set the alarm. I watch from about 11:20 to 11:55 Central. I t was very clear (and cold) here. The moon was high enough that I couldn’t see it from windows.
It was pretty neat – think I liked it best a bit past totality when a sliver of bright white contrasted with the dark red.
First I got up just after it started and checked. Just a small notch taken out.
Later I looked at the clock and saw it was a few minutes to totality. By then the Moon was too high to see out the windows. So I went downstairs to the family room and could see it thru the skylights. I grabbed a blanket and some pillows and laid down on the floor and watched.
After totality it was mostly a murky orange* color. But the “top” (north) edge was surprisingly whitish. (About 40 degrees clockwise from the last bit of real white before totality.) So not a “cool” uniform orange.
After about 10 minutes of totality I went back to bad.
Let me tell you, this astronomy stuff is tough. Maybe not as tough as Guillaume Le Gentil had it trying to see a transit of Venus, but the floor wasn’t all that soft, let me tell you.
I don’t get it. Why a “blood” Moon when it is clearly orange. Since when are there blood oranges? Oh, never mind.
My best attempt at an image. It shows the colors a little but doesn’t really do the real thing justice at all. My camera has 60x zoom but didn’t seem to be able to deal with the one bright spot and rest being dark.
My camera’s auto functions were freaking out too - even on the Low Key setting, which usually works pretty well for stuff like this. It took some patience and fiddling around to get it to do what I wanted. This is the best one.
That’s pretty good. I think the cameras had to choose between the bright spot having the right exposure or the darker part having the right exposure, hard to get both with point-and-shoot.
Shockingly, we had clear skies here in the Seattle area. Great views all through totality. Also it was a super-low tide, so went on a low tide night beach walk here on Vashon Island. Moon snails, sea pens, sea anemones, all cool.
So how orange or red did the moon actually look to you? I only saw the very slightest orange tint here, yet the photos I am seeing online are very orange. This makes me wonder how much of that was real and how much was Photoshop.
Maybe not as tough as 