Ah-wooooooo!
Last night's eclipse was stunningly beautiful, the moon ablaze with brilliant color in the final minutes before totality. It didn't look like we would even get to see this eclipse: a big winter storm had rolled in the night before, and it was still snowing the afternoon of the event. But the storm moved on, and by 11:30 the moon was way up high in a crystal clear sky. Clear, and cold—0°F and windy. I had to stop taking photos at some point because I could no longer operate the camera with my frozen fingers...but I got the frames I needed to make this picture in the first few minutes of shooting.
Usually, the moon's brightness drowns out the stars around it, but during an eclipse the moon becomes a lot fainter (illuminated only by post-sunset light sneaking around the edge of the earth), making it possible to see our nearest neighbor in space as a great sphere floating in a sea of stars.
The photo above is a composite of four short (1 & 2 sec.) exposures of the moon, stacked and sharpened, plus a 10-second exposure to bring out the stars, all taken 13 minutes after the start of the hour-long totality. (And 13 minutes after a meteoroid slammed into the southwestern edge of the moon: see here and here and here.) The photos were taken with a Nikon D5300 camera and AstroTech AT-65Q telescope working as a 420mm telephoto lens. Processing via Affinity Photo, Paint Shop Pro 6, FastStone Image Viewer, and RegiStax (wavelets sharpening).
This was the last total lunar eclipse visible here in Massachusetts for a while; the next one will be on May 16, 2022.
