I had to go out around 6:30 last night; surprisingly, I needed sunglasses then. Hope? Nope, it was cloudy when I came home around 9:30.
I did go outside around 11ish & it was fully cloudy except you could see the moon fairly clearly, even seeing the clouds moving by moonlight didn’t diminish it much. Hope? Then I remembered that it won’t be as bright during the eclipse so I went to bed for the night.
I’ve had more bad luck with the moon over the years with clouds/rain/wind on the night I want to shoot it.
I went to bed around 10pm, with an alarm set for 0250, a few minutes before the center of totality. The weather at bedtime was totally clear & about 70F/21C. The Moon appeared totally normal. Which makes sense; the penumbral phase had yet to begin.
When the alarm went off I yanked on some clothes, grabbed my binocs & phone cam & headed outside. Totally clear skies, temp was 68/20 with a light breeze. The Moon was the expected ruddy red-orange with the darker areas a brownish shade. Mars was also visible about 40 degrees away and they were a similar shade of red.
To my surprise, there was a distinctly better lit whitish crescent along roughly the 12:30 to 1:30 position, so northeast-ish. I was concerned enough to check online and make sure I had not screwed up my UTC-local conversions and had missed totality, but I had not. It really was the time of the center of totality and the Moon did then have at least part of it better lit. Color me unable to explain that versus the advertised expectations of a total lunar eclipse.
As always in suburbia, local light pollution pretty well drowns out all but a dozen of the very brightest stars. But through my 12-power spotting scope I could see a few stars within 2-4 Moon-diameters and one star within a single Moon-diameter. My only camera is my phone, and it sucks at astrophotography; the autofocus can’t figure out what to focus (heh) on. But I have no doubt some awesome pix were taken by folks with real gear.
After about 15 minutes of viewing with spotting scope & 8x binocs I went back to bed.
I’m glad I got to see it. I’ve only had a couple lunar eclipses where I was located deep in the night during the long totality. I’ve always been in the twilight zone when the Moon was at its best.
Moonrise today is about 10 minutes after sunset here. Which ought to be spectacular if the skies along the horizon stay clear. Tomorrow will be even better; the extra ~hour of darkness before Moonrise lets it really stand out against the darkened sky & sea. While not yet making it obviously less than fully 100% round.
Hmmm. Was your conversion to local time more specific than just local time zone? Because, of course, true local time changes continuously with longitude even in the same timezone region, but I’m guessing you already knew that.
I stayed up late for the nerd twofer of seeing the eclipse and finishing my Pi Day baking for my students and colleagues, so I got a few good looks at it in the intervals of slaving over a hot stove. Skies were clear in my neck of the northeast US, at least away from the horizon, so visibility was good.
I did not do any conversion more details than UTC-Eastern.
But IMO for a lunar eclipse that’s all that matters. The view is the same for everyone on Earth at any time during the eclipse process. The only differences are how far the Moon is above your local horizon, and whether the Sun is up, down, or in twilight at your location.
Yep. Around here it’s an informal beach party most months. There’s about 3 days where the Moon looks round enough; no obvious flat spot. The first day is about 60 minutes before sunset, the second very close to sunset, and the third about an hour after. Which day(s) to go just depend on what sort of backdrop you want to capture the Moon against.
I got up around three and went out to see it as well, mostly because a dog was taking up all the space on my bed. I took pictures with my phone, but they really didn’t turn out well. I didn’t expect they would!
Same here. It was a beautifully clear night right up until totality was about to hit. I had promised my wife and son a blood moon, but got absolutely nothing.
Not the first and won’t be the last time Pacific Northwest weather scuttles my plans to turn my kid on to skywatching. The 2023 annular solar eclipse was almost a complete dud, too.
But they are not seeing the same eclipse stages at the same clock time.
Example: If totality begins at 06:26 UTC in Greenwich, then it’ll begin at 02:26 (01:26 without daylight savings time adjustment) for somebody whose local meridian of longitude is exactly 75 degrees west of Greenwich, which is the central meridian of the Eastern time zone. (Fifteen degrees of longitude equals 1/24 of a complete circle equals one hour’s worth of terrestrial rotation, so the five-hour difference between Eastern standard time 01:26 and UTC 06:26 represents 5 times 15 = 75 degrees of longitude. The daylight savings adjustment throws it off by an hour.)
The same beginning of totality phenomenon will be viewed at 03:26 (again, 02:26 without daylight savings adjustment) for somebody with local meridian 60 degrees west, which is the central meridian of the Atlantic time zone.
And remember, time zones are discrete approximations to continuously changing local longitude and local time. The change in local mean time between different longitudes isn’t happening only at time zone boundaries: it’s happening everywhere.
So if your local meridian has longitude somewhere between 60 W and 75 W, you will not see totality beginning at 02:26 (daylight savings) by your clock time, that’ll be too early. You’ll have to wait till sometime between 02:26 and 03:26, depending on your exact longitude, to see the same phenomenon that somebody on the Greenwich meridian is viewing at 06:26.
If you aren’t standing right on the central meridian of your local time zone, your local mean time, astronomically speaking, is not the same as the time on your clock that agrees with all the other clocks in your time zone. So people in the same time zone but at different longitudes are not going to be seeing the same astronomical stuff (e.g., sunset, moonrise, entrance of moon into earth’s shadow, etc.) at the same clock time.
For a solar eclipse I agree completely that the time of visible totality needs to be customized to the location of the viewer, not merely to the tz of the viewer. Exactly as you have described.
But AFAIK that is not applicable to a lunar eclipse. The entire sphere of the Moon is within the Earth’s umbral shadow from one particular UTC moment to some other later particular UTC moment about 1 hour and 5 minutes later. It does not matter where on Earth you are standing during that time. If the UTC time is within that ~hour-long totality window, and you have line of sight to the Moon, then the entire sphere of the Moon, and hence the hemisphere you can see, will be fully inside the Earth’s shadow and fully darkened.
If you saw a white rim on the eastern edge of the moon, then it was starting to emerge from the shadow, so yeah, you did miss the center of totality by a bit. That means that your location must be west of the central meridian of the Eastern time zone, i.e., a longitude somewhat higher than 75 degrees W.
If your (publicly visible) SDMB profile location putting you in SE Florida is accurate, then yeah, that tracks: SE Florida is about 80W longitude.
Yes, I know. But the point is that where that 65-minute interval falls in your local mean time is not determined solely by the nominal clock time that’s common across your whole time zone.
In other words, the trouble was that you did not set your alarm for a local mean time accurately corresponding to 06:50 Greenwich time, no matter what your clock said.
I mean, think about it: if somebody in Chicago set their alarm for 02:50 in order to see the center-of-totality moment, and then complained that totality didn’t happen, you’d tell them “No, you got it wrong! That happened at 01:50 your time, because you’re an hour farther west!”
Same deal. The center-of-totality moment happened at maybe 02:30ish your (local mean) time, because you’re a bit farther west than the 75W meridian for which the 4- or 5-hour difference between Eastern time and UTC is calculated.
Actually, now that I’ve had more sleep I don’t feel so sure about this explanation! My sleep-deprived brain had firmly persuaded me of this rationale but I think more thinking is required…
My cats and inner bio clock woke me up and the moon which had been shining in my window earlier was not. I remembered to look outside and at first I thought I was looking at an engorged Mars. But it was the moon, just after totality iirc.
