The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...all are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
September 27, 2015
Pacific Northwest
Like everyone else who had clear skies (except those people I saw watching tv through their living room window as I walked out to the beach, and possibly others, for whatever reason) I made a point of looking for the supermoon/bloodmoon/lunar eclipse last night.
I'm an amateur photographer and have never gotten around to manipulating settings like f-stop and aperture. I have a nice Nikon camera but I use it like a point-and-shoot. So with that in mind, here is a series of photos I took during the eclipse, playing around with landscape vs portrait mode etc, zoomed or not, just for fun, knowing the really good photos of this event would be posted on the media by many serious astronomical photographers.
Given that, here's a fun photographic look at the superbloodmoon over the evening on the Pacific Northwest coast. Went out to the beach after dinner, and waited until the already eclipsed moon rose above the trees on the eastern horizon. It was still daylight, so the moon is pretty faint, but a pretty pinky orange. It came up pretty much due east.
7:28pm PDT:
(All photos by me. In Lightbox...click to enlarge)
Getting darker, so we can see the color better. Notice it's brighter on the lower right. There's also a plane or something moving in a streak since the camera insisted on leaving the shutter open for a while.
7:47 pm:
Getting darker.
7:53 pm:
Now the mosquitoes were starting to bite my feet so we retreated home where we hoped the moon would be above the trees by now. We are mostly in the woods however east and south are our best directions for viewing the sky. I was bracing the camera on railings to take all these pics since I don't have a tripod but even so I had to hold my breath while the shutter snapped. If the camera agreed to take a picture at all. If I breathed at all my pictures came out like this:
All the photos are at some zoom setting except this next one. It's like if the camera didn't sense enough light it wouldn't take a picture, and zoomed up the moon shows more light compared to dark sky. On this one I brought up the shadows after downloading it (otherwise all I did was crop on any of these, not even knowing where horizontal was, to be able to straighten the horizon).
8:11 pm:
8:18 pm:
The brighter part of the moon has shifted over to the left as the shadow moves right, and the tiniest bit of unshadowed moon is starting to emerge now. You can see some stars in this image, shifting position slightly, the camera not utterly still. They look like little cooked quinoa grains.
8:24 pm:
The totality has ended, the white of a normal full moon is now visible growing from the left. The eclipsed section is drowned out by the brightness.
9:00 pm:
9:16 pm:
Later on when we went out for our soak in the tub the full moon was so bright we could have read by it. It cast distinct shadows. Pretty cool having clear skies this night.
This morning I saw a neat photo someone took showing the transit of the International Space Station across the eclipsed moon. Both in focus.
And here's what the eclipse would have looked like from the moon. Isn't that ring of sunsets amazing!
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All nature observations welcome in the comments. What are you seeing in nature where you live today?
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