Lunar Eclipse Images

Although some clouds threatened the viewing, North Carolina observers were able to see the lunar eclipse in the early morning hours of Wednesday, October 8. Because the eclipse would be occurring as the moon is setting in our location, you needed a very low western horizon to see totality. Raleigh Astronomy Club members and many others were able to get some very good images of the event. Click the read more link for even more views!

Although challenging being low in the sky, Chris Cole was able to shoot a series of HDR images to create a panel (see image above).

A zoomed in view of Chris’ image shows not only the eclipsed moon, but also the planet Uranus. Click on the image to see the larger view and look for the blue dot in the lower right hand portion of the image.

Another fantastic image was taken by Mark and Phyllis Lang.

There were also some club members who made some great animations of the eclipse. Joe Pedit made this series of images from Jordan Lake. RAC member Michael Kidd created this video of the eclipse and posted it on YouTube.

Of course there were many non-RAC, non North Carolina views of the eclipse which could be seen all over the US. A very good shot of the moon was taken by Rogelio Bernal Andreo (of www.deepskycolors.com), posted on Facebook, and featured on many websites. Click here to see the image. You can not only see Uranus, but also the moons of Uranus. And finally for a really different view, the NASA Messenger space probe in orbit around Mercury shot a series of images for the eclipse. You can these in a blog entry by the planetary society.