Total Lunar Eclipse
My 3 kids loved seeing the pink moon (despite dad trying to take some photo’s with them hanging on my back).
The photo’s were taken with an Olympus E500 with a 150mm lens. I worked out that using the 2sec delay timer to take the photo stopped camera shake (I had it on a $10 tripod).
I increased the exposure time to get more light and the pink/red colour into the shot. This is brighter than it actually looked but the colour is very real.
This was about as close to the human eye version that I could get while the moon was in total eclipse.
I suppose the diffracted light halo around the earth must be so bright that it’s enough to light up the moons surface. Maybe someone can explain why it creates the pink colour?
August 29th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Good shots Mark of last night’s spectacular moon. My kids are now “adults” and very only vaguely interested so you were lucky to have your there and sharing it with them.
The reason that it turns pink/red is that as the light from the sun passes through the Earth’s atmosphere on the way to the moon, it absorbs the blue spectrum from the white light of the sun and thus leaves the red spectrum colours to be the little light that does fall on the moon during the eclipse.
Well at least that’s the layman’s reasons. I’m sure that there are cosmologists out there that could give a much more detailed explanation.
August 29th, 2007 at 10:38 am
cool thanks! I won’t look like the guy in the Bigpond add when i next answer a tough question from my kids!