The moon is eclipsed tonight – right now ! But it’s not something you’d really notice much because it’s a ‘Penumbral’ eclipse. So it just gets a bit dimmer for a couple of hours (unevenly) and then it’s over. But from Singapore we’re seeing a nice Lunar Halo. This is an iPhone fish-eye view.
Well, maybe I was a bit too dismissive about what a penumbrally eclipsed Moon looks like.
This is the maximum phase of the eclipse from where I am – at the exact moment of Astronomical Full Moon. And you can definitely see that about half the Moon’s face is darkened and half not so much. If we were standing on the Moon right now looking back at the Earth, we’d see Earth in silhouette – partially covering the Sun’s face – more or less so, depending on which part of the Moon we were standing on. There wouldn’t be any place where the Sun was totally covered. Not in this eclipse. Standing on the Moon during a proper TOTAL lunar eclipse would be spectacular, though – I hope I can do it some day !!!
This is a very crude photo taken with an iPhone with one of those little add-on telephoto lenses clipped in front of the lens. It’s good fun though – I really didn’t expect it to get any detail at all.
One more thing. You can view this in stereo but it’s not really a stereo view – there was no baseline, so no ‘depth’ information. But viewing two shots as a stereo does confirm what is real and what is just noise.
Bri
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