Thursday, December 23, 2010

Lunar Eclipse: KJRH viewer pics from December 21, 2010


NOTE: Click on all these pictures for larger, higher resolution images. The moon looks cool!



(ABOVE: Wow, just wow! Click on the picture for the high resolution details. Gerald Miller from Muskogee generously shared this picture of the moon during the lunar eclipse.)

My wife and I woke up at 2am on December 21 to view the lunar eclipse from our front yard. Looking straight up, the moon appeared as an orange dot nearly overhead. This was the first lunar eclipse on the Winter solstice in 456 years! A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth is perfectly aligned between the sun and the moon causing Earth to cast a shadow on the moon.

These pictures from KJRH viewers are what you missed if you slept.



(ABOVE: The beautiful mosaic was compiled by Mr. Miller. He took pictures every 10 minutes from 11:34pm to 4:01am)

(BELOW: Lonnie Iannazzo shows the stages of the eclipse. The orange tint on the moon is thought to be from the reflection of the sun's rays off of Earth.)

(BELOW: The full moon returned to "normal" as shown in this beautiful picture from Alison Stone of Bixby.)

4 comments:

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  2. I received this comment from Gerald Miller in an email: "Thanks, again. By the way, the weather did certainly play a role. The sky was not very cooperative with a high layer of thins clouds most of the evening. You can see how it degraded over 5 hours in the mosaic because at the end, the emerging moon started making the image "fuzzy" as the reflected sunlight illuminated the increasingly thicker clouds in the higher atmosphere."

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  3. Amazing shots, it is one of the coolest events that nature can provide us.

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  4. Beautiful pics, I love them because for me the moon is one of the beautifulest things we can get, that's perfect that's the reason I have a lot of moon's pics at home.

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