There’s a great big lunar eclipse tomorrow, but you have to be on the right side of the planet to see it. Florida, in this case, is the Wrong Side.
It would be a super cool eclipse, though, because the moon will be passing pretty close to the center of the Earth’s shadow (technically, through the umbral region instead of the penumbra), instead of partly inside, partly outside the umbra (even Nature only scores a perfect hit every now and again):
The last eclipse visible from Florida was just a few months ago (December). It was pretty good, but nothing like the one from 2000 or the one tomorrow. Here’s a shot I took that night near totality; you can see how much darker the southern half (bottom) of the moon is than the northern portions:
Tomorrow’s eclipse should produce a more nearly uniform darkening of the moon; something I’d really like to see. The last time we had a “head-on” eclipse like this was back in July of 2000, and I not in position to see it, as, once again, I was on the wrong side of the planet. Had I been in Hawaii, I would have been able to see an almost perfect “umbral shot,” even better than tomorrow’s will be:
I do think I saw the lunar eclipse from January of 2000, but lunar eclipses are a dime a dozen (we get two a year visible from roughly half the planet each time), so they’re starting to blend together. And I don’t have any pictures in my iPhoto library from that far back! (Plus, I had barely started interesting myself in astronomy at the time, and certainly not in astrophotography.)
Related Images:
