This is about the best I got. Focus a little off despite a tripod.

Good night. Thanks for the astronomy lesson!

Beautiful shot! Thanks for sharing!

Any luck, Sandy? This would be the time to go out. You have about 20 minutes or so until the moon starts coming out of our shadow.

Not much, clouds kept covering it. I never saw the red, only the first phase.

How the heck did you learn so much about the solar system?

I photoshopped a few stages together.

thanks for sharing your photo

I fell asleep.....:rolleyes:

Tibbe got me up about 2:30 a.m. to take him potty outside and we saw the Blood Moon at a nice medium shade of "red". We live in the Dallas area. It was pretty high in the sky and very striking to see the moon any color other than that bright whitish look - very pretty.

Great shots and photoshopping, Mike.

Nice shots, Mike. It was too cloudy here in S.C. too see anything and is pouring rain right now.

I thought that star next to the moon was Spica, but its proximity kept me from seeing its normal bright blue color. I actually shouldn't say star, since Spica is a binary system of two stars orbiting each other.

I have always thought physics was really interesting. If you want to see a really cool demonstration of the Rayleigh scattering that made that moon red last night, fast forward to the 27:20 mark of this video below where Walter Lewin (greatest teacher I have ever seen) shows how cigarette smoke scatters blue light from all the tiny particles in the smoke.


A few minutes later he also simulates exactly what happened with the moon last night by shining white light into a liquid solution of very fine particles that scatter off all the blue light. The video above is a nontechnical lecture. If you want the version that he gives to his actual MIT class with all the math I can post that one too.

As for astronomy, I took a couple of free courses on coursera last year, having known almost nothing other than the physics before. An astronomy course from Duke and then a course on galaxies and cosmology from Caltech.

Loved this pic, great job!

Wow, I am amazed. Ya learn something every day. My BF would love this, he is fascinated with the universe and much more scientific than I am.

Thanks for the video links - going to watch those this weekend. We have 3 more of these to go over a few years so I want to learn more.

Wow, just found another frame of the eclipse! Werewolf? :D;)

That was interesting. You sound like my sister, you guys would get along soooooo good LOL I always learn so much from her:D

I totally missed it. I didn't even know about it. I was so bummed. :(

You'll get another chance to see one in ?October? I think it is and two more after that in the next 18 mos. We're awash in blood moons.

If Tibbe hadn't awakened me to go potty outside, I would have totally missed it, too. So, since I was up, I turned on CNN and saw some of their live feed from South American and California with close-up shots but went back to bed before it got to its darkest shades.

You mean I get front row seats... cool. LOL

I read that the October 8th lunar eclipse will be in a lower western orbit, slightly larger and possibly more spectacular than this one and you should have a front-row seat if you live in SF, San Jose and Oakland areas of Cali. And then two more after that, April 4, 2015 and the last on Sept. 27, 2015, to complete this blood moon lunar tetrad.

Nope, I'm in L.A. Darn!

Oh, rats! Well, maybe the April or September events will come your way!

The entire October 2014 eclipse will be visible to you in LA, with the full eclipse starting at roughly 3:30AM.

You're in luck! The site I was looking at just listed northern Cali but I defer to our forum expert!!! :D

Now, just be sure you set the clock to remind you once the moon rises that night! No excuses this time.

What's funny is that theimage of the moon is no bigger when it's low on the horizon vs when it's high. I know it's really hard to believe that since the moon looks enormous just as it's rising or setting, but it's nothing to do with the atmosphere expanding the image so it looks big. It's purely in our heads; our brains interpret things low on the horizon as being bigger since we have building, mountains, signs, etc to compare the moon against when looking at it low on the horizon. If you measure the angle subtended by the full moon, say using your fingers with your arm fully oitstretched, you'll get the same measurement when the full moon is low as when it is high!

Can't really call myself an expert; I just looked it up, haha!

Oct 8, 2014 Total Lunar Eclipse ? Where and when to see

Of course, the eclipse you really don't want to miss is the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.

NASA - Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21

It'll be visible in a tiny thin band from Oregon through Wyoming to Nebraska then Kentucky through to South Carolina. In a total solar eclipse the Sun will be completely blacked out, and you'll be able to see the extremely hot corona (the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin while the Sun's surface is only a few thousand). What's really cool about solar eclipses is they dim the Sun enough so that stars whose light passes near the Sun on the way to Earth can then be seen, and the gravity of the Sun deflects these rays of light slightly so that the stars appear to be in different places! It's not something measurable unless you're taking photos with a professional telescope, but this is exactly how Einstein's theory of general relativity (that heavy objects bend spacetime, and that we feel as gravity is just the curvature of spacetime) was first verified. Einstein begged astronomers to measure the positions of stars whose light beams passed near the Sun by going out and looking for solar eclipses so that these deflected beams of light could be seen. It took 3 years before they were finally verified! The first team that was going to do measure this deflection (in 1914) got captured behind Russian lines as WWI has just broken out days before. The next two teams got horrible weather. But it was finally verified in 1917. It has since been verified by a few other experiments, and general relativity is also critical to the operation of GPS. If we didn't have this theory we could not have GPS, as predictions using Newton's theory of gravity wouldn't be accurate enough for it to be useful to us.

August 21, 2017 would be the time to visit Grand Teton NP, as the shadow of the moon passes almost directly over the mountain so that you'll get nighttime and total solar eclipse there in the park. I'm going to try to go out to Kentucky or Nebraska probably for it though, as I'm sure camping spots will be really tough to get that day and I don't want to pay the high prices of staying in the park or in Jackson, WY. God I hope the weather cooperates, as I have never seen a total solar eclipse from inside the path of the moon's shadow (it's very very narrow since the moon is so tiny in comparison to the Sun).

haha, I always thought it was man in the moon, not teapot yorkie in the moon!

OMG that post above has so many grammatical errors! I stink at posting from a tablet!