There was a total lunar eclipse last night, but the moon was almost eclipsed too much. The sky had been going from almost fully clear to almost fully overcast and back throughout the afternoon and early evening. No one knew for sure whether the moon would be visible during the eclipse, which would last from 10.30pm to 2.11 am, with the total phase occurring between 11.44pm and 0.58am.

We got a good start, with only a few scattered clouds at 10.30pm. The shadow of the Earth was clearly visible on the moon’s lower left, slowly creeping across the rest of the surface. I was out with my bike, camera and tripod, trying to get a few pictures in between the clouds, and meanwhile riding around looking for a good (dark) location to catch the total phase from. That brought me to parts of Leiden I’d never been before, including what I later discovered to be a bike racing track.

With some ten minutes to go before totality (where the moon is entirely in the Earth’s shadow), I set up my tripod on an empty parking lot just outside the city limits. The illuminated part of the moon continued to shrink and shrink and shrink… and then disappeared entirely.

Behind a pack of clouds.

At 11.42pm, two minutes before totality, a seemingly endless stretch of clouds came in from the west and obscured the moon. I felt robbed. Granted, a lunar eclipse is not nearly as spectacular as a solar eclipse, but I’d never seen one before (contrary to a solar eclipse; I saw the 1999 total eclipse in Belgium) and I was looking forward to seeing the moon turn a dark brownish red. Alas, no such luck. To make matters worse, it started raining and I had wondered off quite far from home. I was soaked to my underpants by the time I got back, but I wasn’t about to give up just yet.

The rain subsided a bit, so I changed into a dry jacket and a dry pair of shoes, and went out again. Before long it had stopped raining again and the clouds got a bit thinner. Eventually they broke altogether and I got a ten-minute window to behold the fully eclipsed, dark red moon. After that the clouds returned and it started raining again, but I didn’t care. I’d seen the eclipse.

The partially eclipsed moon at 11.04, 11.14 and 11.30pm (40, 30 and 14 minutes before totality) and the fully eclipsed moon at 0.39am (55 minutes into the 74-minute total phase). The poor quality is due to the limited capabilities of my camera.

Clouds came in again around 0.45am to make the rest of the eclipse invisible from Leiden.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 18:03 and is filed under Photography, Science: Astronomy, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.