Lunar Eclipse

There was a lunar eclipse this evening. Indeed it's still going on as I type this.

I took a bit of a sequence of photos of it which you can see over on my Flickr stream, but here are one or two of the best.

A lunar eclipse is caused when the Earth completely blocks out all the light from the Sun on the Moon - all three are lined up. Because the Earth's that much bigger, it completely obliterates the Moon's light (the reason we see the Moon is because sunlight is falling on it). However the Sun's light refracts in the Earth's atmosphere. Red light refracts more than any of the other colours, so the Moon appears red to us looking at it from Earth.

Anyway, here are the photos:

This looks almost completely like a full moon. In fact there's a little darkness in the bottom left hand corner.

The moon darkens in an unusual manner. You don't see the normal "crescent" that you would during the normal phases of the moon. In any case, just a little earlier it was a full moon. This picture was taken at 22:26.

Taken during "Totality" only a few minutes before the mid eclipse, this shows the red colouring caused by light refracting in the Earth's atmosphere. Note that I've only played around with the exposure in these photos and haven't touched the colouring at all. You really would have seen this red colouring if you'd been looking at the time.

Here's the whole sequence I shot in one go...

[UPDATE]

And I couldn't not put up this incredible Cassini photo of Saturn. Yes, it was in all of Saturday's newspapers, but it's still stunning.