Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Burnt Orange Moon

I got up to see the lunar eclipse early this morning, and it was impressive in spite of some thin scattered clouds that partially obscured it for much of the time. I know it would have been more impressive to watch the whole transition to and from totality, but I couldn't really afford to be up that long and still expect to function today. I took a few pictures with my tiny Canon digital, but they don't show much. Astroprof also faced some cloud problems in Texas but he still got some reasonable pictures (including the one I linked to above, thanks Astroprof!) as he shows and reports here. After I returned to my room and went back to bed, I wondered if it might have been visible from my balcony after all - so I went out, leaned over the railing, and looked west, and got to see it through a hole in the clouds, brightening up and looking sort of blotchy (maybe 30 minutes past totality).

I also saw Mars. It was pretty bright and orangy-red but a lot smaller than the Moon (duh). I hope some of the Moon/Mars hoax people got up and looked too, but probably not. No need to risk getting confused by reality!

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