Super Blood Moon Eclipse (Photos)

Here are some pictures I was able to take last night of the Super Blood Moon eclipse. They aren’t all great and you can find some excellent hi-res photos elsewhere I’m sure, but this was my first real go at lunar photography, and I think I did OK. The darker and redder the moon got the tougher it was for me to get good shots. I was shooting with a 16 megapixel Canon SX170 IS.

Watching the moon last night was a really cool experience. My brother had some friends over and there were a bunch of us standing out on the front lawn at the early stages of the eclipse around 9 PM EDST. Later on it was me and my parents, but what was maybe the coolest part was that several of our neighbors came outside to watch it too. Everyone was standing in their front yards and you could hear their voices speaking softly to one another through the dark. Think what it must have been like for our human ancestors to watch an eclipse without knowing the basics of planetary and lunar orbits, and that it was just the earth’s shadow falling across the face of the moon. How they must have wondered! But last night I think I watched the eclipse with as much wonder and awe, even knowing the mechanics behind it, because nature can still dazzle us and show us things that stir something inside of us. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said:

“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.”

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