Photographing the Blood Red Moon

Hawaii sky viewers were blessed with good weather early Wednesday morning as the moon went into eclipse for the second time this year. It was a cosmic show as the Earth's shadow slowly nibbled away on the night's full moon as the giant white disc slipped into darkness. At its apex was totality, an erie state of being where the Earth's shadow almost completely blots out the sunlight. While not exactly dark, the fully eclipsed moon turned a blood red / rustic orange color for all the world to see. And so there it was, the perfect cosmic photo op that had thousands of shutter-bugs snapping away in the early morning darkness. It was a sight to behold!



Wide shot of the fully eclipsed moon high above my building.

A Lot of Effort to Capture Our Ten Percent

The following story was originally published to HawaiiReporter.com.



A few weeks ago Jerry Stanfield asked me that the next time I go on one of my photo excursions, call him up. So I did for today’s partial solar eclipse of the sun.

Jerry is a Vietnam vet who has seen many good days in the photography business documenting a wide variety of subjects ranging from news, product, wedding, fashion and glamour shoots. I met him through a number of Smart Business Hawaii events (from when that organization was known as Small Business Hawaii).

We went to Kaka’ako Waterfront Park in Honolulu to shoot the eclipse. The rare, celestial event had already started by the time we arrived, but was slow to process. The sky was cloudy but hopeful.

There were several pounds of photographic equipment – digital cameras, two tripods, camera bags that we hauled up the park hills in a small cart. We worked our way up to the park’s observation summit. The cameras were set up on the tripods shortly after.

Before shooting began I passed out my home-made mylar lens filters that were supposed to slip over our lenses. The flexible mylar is a protective shield made to protect eyes when used to view the sun. I made the lens filters more than 20 years ago from sheets of mylar purchased from the Bishop Museum and fashioned them into makeshift sleeves that are placed over the lens. These were made for my old Minolta lenses that I used to shoot the solar eclipse on the Big Island in 1991.

I placed the old filter over my 300mm Canon lens… the thing fit as it did the last time I used it. However, I forgot to bring tape to keep it attached to the lens. After a few minutes of fiddling with it and also not getting the ongoing eclipse into focus, I gave that up and passed the filter to Jerry. Two other filters that I had were so small as to not even fit over my Canon T3i’s lens.

Jerry brought his Fujifilm HS-10 camera that has a built-in 720mm zoom. Wow! We found a rubber band and attached the filter that I had on the Canon to his HS-10. The rubber band made that mylar sleeve snap firmly into place over the camera lens. He was in business.

By the time we got that going and seeing the results yielded from Jerry’s camera, I decided to ditch my effort to shoot this. He did a highly commendable job in getting most of the photos shot. I resigned myself to taking the ancillary place photos of Jerry and the Kaka’ako Waterfront Park surroundings.

All of this effort was used to capture images of a solar eclipse in which the moon only covered 10% of the sun from our location in Honolulu. Viewers in parts of Asia and North America got a full-on, annular eclipse experience if they were in the right place.

The fruits of our joint effort can be seen here as well as on my Flickr website.

Photo credit: Eclipse photo by Jerry Stanfield.



Jerry shooting the eclipse photos with his Fujifilm Finepix camera. May 20, 2012.

Photos of the Week: To December 15, 2011.

Lunar Eclipse of December 10, 2011.



A total eclipse of the moon was visible in most parts of Hawaii not impacted by rainy and cloudy weather. This is the site that early risers were treated to when earth's shadow covered the surface of the full moon after the home planet travelled directly between the sun and moon.

More eclipse photos on my Flickr site.

Hawaiian Sunset and Rainbow



Sunset from Kaka'ako Waterfront Beach Park, Dec. 14, 2011.



This rainbow was also spotted from the park on December 14.

Mel's Flickr Website

LCROSS - No Lunar Impact Cloud

Early this morning at 1:30 AM, NASA crashed the LCROSS space probe and Centuar rocket booster into the moon. The goal is to confirm whether or not there is water at the polar regions of the moon.

Upon impact the LCROSS booster was supposed to kick up a huge cloud of lunar stuff into the barren air. The smaller LCROSS space probe loaded with sensitive instruments and cameras was supposed to record the impact for 3 to 4 minutes on the way to its own impact with the lunar surface.

There was a lot of media and NASA hype building up this event. The public was told that the stuff kicked up by the vehicle impact would be visible to anyone with a good telescope and certainly to those large ground based scopes and the live TV coming from the LCROSS.

I watched NASA TV early this morning. Sad to report at impact time I saw nothing of the fact. There was no impact cloud of stuff strewn into the air. NASA did get confirmation that both vehicles did impact the moon.

NASA TV was broadcast online as well as on Olelo Channel 56 in Honolulu.

With all the build-up of this event, I was expecting a spectacular explosion like the one that happened a few years ago when a space probe was sent crashing into a comet or when comet fragments impacted Jupiter many years ago.

Regardless, it is hoped that NASA did get some kind of data from this $79 million experiment and that results and photos be released to the public later.

Photo: The moon as photographed by LCROSS, courtesy of NASA.

Partially Lame Solar Eclipse

As far as eclipses go, this partial eclipse in Hawaii was quite lame. The new moon did take a bite out of the old sun, but not as much as I expected. At best this partial eclipse peaked with only about 1/8 of the sun munched away by the traveling new moon (or is the the rotating earth?). Must be a combination of both and all.

I shot the photo series at Kaka'ako Waterfront Park on Tuesday afternoon July 21. It was a bright sunshine filled Hawaii day. Perfect sungazing weather with eye protection of course. The camera I used to get the composite was my trusty old Canon 300D SLR with 70-300 telephoto zoom lens. On top of the lens I mounted a home made sleeve with a reflective mylar patch covering the open end. This is the same stuff used for the sun peeps sold at Bishop Museum.

Fact is I bought a rather large sheet of this material from Bishop Museum in 1991 and created the original sleeves to shoot the total eclipse on the Big Island that year. I have saved all the sleeves and sun peeps since then and have now used them for the 3rd time. The last time I brought these out was for a 2004 partial eclipse that I also shot from Kaka'ako Waterfront Park.

In the photo above, the eclipse images were composited into one frame and color enhanced using Adobe Photoshop. See the original composite here.

Additional Links

• Mel's 1991 Solar Eclipse Photos & Blog Post
• Mel's 2004 Solar Eclipse Photos
• 2007 Total Lunar Eclipse
• 2009 July 21 Solar Eclipse (NASA)
• Solar Eclipse Seen in India and Afghanistan
• Asia Darkens under longest solar eclipse of the century
• Solar eclipse darkens Asia (AP)
  

Total Lunar Eclipse

Conditions were nearly perfect last night in Honolulu for viewing and capturing these images of this total lunar eclipse. The rare celestial event was the first total lunar eclipse visible from Hawaii in 4 years. As usual this eclipse was spectacular as they always are. And what made me happy was that I got some decent (though not perfect) photos of the phenomena.

Larger version of this photo.

Apollo 11 - July 20, 1969

Top: Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin. Bottom: Historic photo of astonaut Aldrin on the moon at "Tranquility Base", July 20, 1969. Photos from NASA.

July 20, 1969 -- I remember the day was like no other. We all gathered around our small black and white TV set to catch a glimpse of the first images of Neil Armstrong stepping off "the LEM" and onto the surface of the moon and into the history books.

The first lunar landing and moonwalk by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin went off without a hitch on that distant Sunday in 1969. I still remember a lot of it and I was only a kid. A true space cadet for sure, I kept track of the progress of every flight in the Apollo program. Just the sight of that blurry TV image coming to us from more than 200,000 miles away in space was enough to get me excited about our future in space.

The moonwalk was shown on live TV all around the world. Millions of people watched it. It was one of America's most finest moments. It was a time to truly be proud to be an American. We had won the "space race" and our guys were walking on the moon. And while my vision of personally going to space was never realized, I support the continued success of the United States man in space program.

Yes, our space program is floundering given all the problems with the Space Shuttle and even the space station. Yet, in the spirit of advancing space exploration, the United States and its partners should continue to move forward to take us back to the moon and beyond and create new opportunities and technologies for everyone on earth.

Space is the final frontier. We need to continue to go "where no man has gone before".