Acquisition

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Lunar Eclipse   -  16th June 2011

The lunar eclipse lasted for 100 minutes surpassing the previous eclipse in July 2000. A lunar eclipse comes when the sun, Earth and moon line up and Earth's shadow falls on the moon. It has been reported that this lunar eclipse will be the longest and darkest of this century.

The red colour is a result of the light that manages to reach the moon travelling through the earths atmosphere which cause the blue's in the light to scatter leaving the reaming red colours to reach the moon to get it's red colour.  The red's may have been enhanced on this occasion by the presents of volcanic ash particles in the upper atmoshere.  Exposure times varied from 1/500 of a second with the moon in full sunlight to 30 seconds in the shadow of the earth.  The 30 second exposure's resulted in stars being present in the background images of the moon, something that would not normally occur due to the large difference in brilence between the moon and the stars under normal conditions.

I was very lucky to get these images as the moon only appeared for brief periods between the clouds and showers of rain.  The weather was so bad and unpromising that I nearly did not bother setting up the gear to take these images.  I was very glad that I did as the images and the views that I saw made it all worth the effort.