Last night's eclipse looked like it was going to be a wash for us, with clouds and rain forecast all evening. There was no sign of the moon as the eclipse began, but shortly before the start of totality I began to see stars through breaks in the clouds, so I packed the car and trucked the 'scope & cameras up the hill to Valley View Farm. I got one snapshot a few minutes into totality, then stood around for an hour-and-a-half, listening to birds & crickets and awakened horses munching on grass, as clouds and breaks drifted slowly overhead. Finally, with two minutes to go before the end of totality, a break in the clouds slid over the moon. I snapped a few frames before clouds covered the moon again, and the picture above is the result: a stack of four 1.3-second exposures through the Televue 85.
A lunar eclipse happens when the moon passes through the earth's shadow out in space. The central part of the shadow would be jet-black if it weren't for the earth's atmosphere, which bends small amounts of sunlight around the earth into the shadow. (The bent light is red for the same reason the sun turns reddish as it sets.) Less bent light reaches the center of the shadow, with the result that the shadow has a gradation in brightness. In the picture above, the upper-right portion of the moon is darker because it's near the center of the earth's shadow, and the lower-left portion is lighter because it's right on the edge of the shadow. That lower-left edge is actually slightly bluish due to ozone in the upper atmosphere bending blue light in the way that the lower atmosphere bends red light.
The next lunar eclipse will be on November 8, 2022, but in Massachusetts the moon will be low in a brightening dawn sky during totality. The next total lunar eclipse after that, on March 14, 2025, will be easily visible from here—weather permitting.
