24-03-2007 The night the Moon turned red (Article 78)

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Simon Kenny
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Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2008 9:17 pm
Location: Shannon, Co. Clare, Ireland

24-03-2007 The night the Moon turned red (Article 78)

Post by Simon Kenny » Wed Feb 04, 2009 10:49 am

The night the Moon turned red (Article 78)

Saturday night, March 3rd, the full Moon entered the Earths shadow, and when it did, it turned a dark red colour, some say it looked like a dark copper colour. From Limerick city I took a sequence of images which show how the Moon looked at various times as the eclipse progressed. A montage of 5 of them is merged together and is shown at the bottom of this column.
It started at 8.30 in the evening when the Moon entered the outer area of the Earths shadow; this outer shadow is called the Penumbra. By 9pm, a darkening on the lower left of the Moon had appeared and by 9.25 the Moon was completely in the Penumbra. The sky was perfectly clear, not a cloud in sight. By 09.40, the entire Moon had dimmed and a dark red slice was visible to the lower left. The Moon was now entering the central shadow called the Umbra. This is the first image on the right. At about 10.30, the Moon was on the verge of being fully in the Umbra with a slither of white on one edge; this is the second image (from right to left). At 23.20, the Moon was completely in the centre of Earth’s shadow and this is when I took the central image, a slight haze had appeared in the sky so it wasn’t very sharp. It looked like a dark red Moon, very unusual if you have never seen one before.
At 12.05, the Moon began to leave the Umbra, and at this stage, the red Moon contrasted well against a white beam of light (this is when sunlight could shine directly on to the Moon’s surface) that had appeared in the upper right edge of the Moon, this is the image just left of the centre image. The haze got thicker and the Moon became very hard to see. The white area of the Moon became bigger as the Moon moved out of Earth’s shadow. At 12.30 the Moon was half way out of the shadow (image on the left). By now the clouds were coming in fast, so at this stage I called it a night.
I used a Canon 300D and a 0.3meter Meade LX200 telescope to capture the images, the images were combined using image processing software on a PC. Many others photographed the eclipse also and their images can be seen at the IFAS website (Irish Federation of Astronomy Societies), (http://www.irishastronomy.org). The next lunar eclipse visible from Ireland is on August 16 2008, so let’s hope the weather is good on that night. Clear skies! Dave Lillis

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