Full Lunar Eclipse Feb 20/21 / Earth picture Options

[bjb]

I see we have a full lunar eclipse coming on Feb 20/21 (depending where you live).

I know that even during a full eclipse the Moon is still visible with a coppery hue, due to the refraction of light around the Earth.

Now that we have a bunch of probes in orbit of the Moon, is there any plan / is it possible to take an image of the Earth from the Moon during totality? (or has this already been done?)

I would think that a picture of the Earth surrounded by a red ring would be amazing!

[scalbers]

Very nice and engaging presentation of the various viewpoints by DDAVIS.

With this inspiration I'm taking another look at the atmospheric scattering in the two models I've been developing. It's interesting to consider how the orange refracted sunlight merges in with the scattered (blue skylight) in the view from the moon. In most cases, the refracted sunlight is much brighter than the skylight, except they can be equivalent right in the lowest 2km or so above the Earth's limb. Another point of reference is that when we are in the center of the umbra the ring of sunlight extends up to 4km above the limb. Clouds will completely break the red ring in various places. When we are a bit off from the umbral center, then this ring has a variable thickness going above and below the 4km value.

Now with my more general "allsky" model I'm generating some views of an eclipse from the moon. The full view animation catches most of the total phase with some recent improvements. This includes some actual model clouds (for an arbitrary time) with the Earth's rotation bringing various clouds into view resulting in the shifting breaks in the red ring.



Here is a full view 4K animation.

The scattered light of the blue sky is barely visible given the "exposure" settings that are designed to show the sun without washing out its colors, though the animated GIFs introduce artifacts masking the sky. In the still 8K frames the faint blue counts are a good test of monitor contrast and calibration. Brightness is displayed in a linear fashion, though the "exposure" changes with each frame. Might be nice to have a display utility allowing one to easily adjust the displayed brightness from 16-bit images. That would be one way to show the HDR without changing the inherent brightness relationships.