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!
I read somewhere that it will be possible to see both the setting sun and the rising orange moon in Los Angeles that evening. I'm curious how high you have to be to get that view - it might be the perfect time to visit Griffith Observatory!
Interesting thought! In the past I was too wondering how a total lunar eclipse would look from the moon. Let's cross the fingers Kaguya will be able to take some (stunning?) HDTV shots of this event. Though the timeline is pretty tight, especially when considering that Kaguya needs about 120 minutes for one revolution.
>I read somewhere that it will be possible to see both the setting sun and the rising orange moon in Los Angeles that evening.
And what a sight! It looks like the Moon will just be entering the inner dark shadow as it rises.
>I'm curious how high you have to be to get that view - it might be the perfect time to visit Griffith Observatory!
Griffith might be nice, but I don't recall if the mountains at the observatory block the eastern horizon. I recall hiking to a lookout point a couple miles east of the Observatory when trying to see the clouded out Annular eclipse and we were looking down on it against the city background. I would at any rate suggest getting away from the city lights as much as possible. I fear that only the latter portion of totality will be seen in or close to a night time sky from Southern California. (I am in Palm Springs)
I love Lunar eclipses, the subtle colors visible inside the Earth shadow can be seen by the human eye better than what all but the most dedicated photographic efforts can record. I think rapidly shot RGB filtered grayscale images should do the job but practically all film and most digital images I have seen render the shadows as little more than a garish red orange. I have in the past 30 years of taking down color observations at one time or another seen muted examples of color from the entire spectrum within the umbra region. I have seen some video images which do surprisingly well despite the limited exposure latitude inherent to that medium.
A summary of my observations of the last such eclipse can be seen at the top of this page:
http://www.donaldedavis.com/BM07WEB/BM07page2.html
Earlier Lunar Eclipse observations are at the bottom of this page:
http://www.donaldedavis.com/2003NEW/ASTROOBS2.html
This starts with a made-for-print reproduction oil painting exaggerating the colors, and later digital efforts aspiring to capture a visual impression on the screen.
Don
"Surveyor III was able to get some variously filtered images of an eclipse in 1966. One color-composite version is shown"
A couple years <or decades, it feels like now> I posted here a considerably improved pair of the Surveyor 3 images, reassembled from good quality black and white color separations published in JPL TR series reports on Surveyor.
The image linked to had massive overexposure saturating part of the bright limb and "blooming" of the overexposed image on the vidicon detector. The original NASA Press Release image was horrible, even given that data's blooming problem.
The other image was actually the much better image but was never press released in color. In my reconstruction, you can see parts of the faint blue ring of upper atmospheric scattering of sunlight with orange-red blobs where gaps in clouds on the limb let direct sunlight get refracted around the limb to reach the camera.
I've tried poking around the archives here and I don't find the post. It's not on my internetting computer at the moment, so I'll have to dig for it.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p128a.jpg
Everyone, quickly, get on your knees and pray! Some great evil monster has swallowed up the Moon!
All seriousness aside, it's a really visually stunning eclipse. I don't have the proper imaging equipment, or I'd take a pic and share it. As of about five minutes ago, there was a nice bright white rind along the southeast limb, and the rest of the face of the Moon was colored a lovely shade of copper... *grin*...
-the other Doug
Strange coincidence - Apollo 12 witnessed a solar eclipse while carrying back from the Moon the camera of Surveyor III, which had also photographed a solar eclipse.
Beautiful eclipse tonight! I hope lots of folks got to see it.
"Beautiful eclipse tonight! I hope lots of folks got to see it."
Here in New Jersey, we really lucked out with the weather tonight. The astronomy club I belong to scheduled an eclipse viewing event, and when we first arrived, there were a lot of clouds, and the moon kept alternating between being visible and totally obscured. It was also somewhat hazy. But by the time the eclipse really got underway, the sky had totally cleared to the point that we had what is probably the clearest sky possible at the observatory, which is not in a dark sky location. Everybody was thrilled with the beautiful view, and we had the opportunity to see it with binoculars and telescopes people had brought. Since the sky got so clear, we used the observatory's 24 inch telescope to view Saturn along with several of its moons. The only drawback was it was quite cold, probably in the 20s. Still, viewing this eclipse was a wonderful experience, and I can't wait to see the pictures several club members took.
I had a view of the eclipse for a while (in other words, between clouds). Here are a few shots (I haven't even downloaded all the pictures from the camera yet).
Very clear sky over Marseille in France.
Some pictures taken this night :
Rising over Puget Mount at 19:00 :
Before entering the shadow of the earth, Regulus and Saturn are following the very bright moon :
And some eclipse phasis :
Continuing the diving into the shadow
Saturn and Regulus began to lightens more:
Shadow progress :
Sort of color that I like :
And finally, full eclipse :
Larger view to see stellar field :
And labels :
The ending :
A recapitulative board with view center on Earth shadow :
Avec l'ombre de la Terre :
Some humidity this ending night (this is the reflector I used to put my numeric camera in parallel):
Very nice Ant! Exactly how it looked in Boston.
-Floyd
I wonder how Chang'e and Kaguya came thru it.
Doug
The eclipse began under a rare rainy sky in Palm Springs, Calif., and as totality began I dispaired of seeing the event. The skies then cleared about a third of the way through totality and I set up my 6 inch reflector, binocculars, video camera and drawing stuff. I hastily drew isophotes on a set of printed out full moon images within which color and brightness information could be noted, using the WWV time signal.
I notice again the tendency of even excellent digital camera pictures to shift the color balance toward garish oranges and reds. The reality as seen by at least this pair of eyes is more subtle and varied. I used the video later to help in drawing the tonal values within the shadow.
This eclipse, at least starting at mid totality, appeared fairly muted in the intensity and range of colors within the Earth shadow. The southern portion near the shadow boundary was a light golden yellow, and the eastern part of the disk displayed a nice spectral gradation to muted orange and duller rusty red. The western Moon shadow colors at that time were less saturated, duller, with a sharper gradation to the dark brown shadow core, or umbra region. The brighter western colors faded in the latter part of totality, and a pale gray lighting appeared along the SW limb, displaced N from the closest part of the shadow edge, shortly before totality ended. As the sunlit Moon returned the shadow colors moved off the disk and faded in the brightning sky. (P.S. I'm having trouble uploading an image file-it never stops telling me it's uploading)
Don
Curse the tropical climate
The eclipse was scheduled to take place at 4am here in Dar es Salaam.
There was not a single cloud in the sky at midnight so you can imagine my dismay and frustration when a cloud cover developed and did not let up till sunrise!
By then the moon had set...great pictures Ant. how I wish I could have seen it myself.
Yes! Your 3:38 and 3:51 images are *exactly* what I saw with my naked eye. A coppery feel to the whole scene, edging to an ochre-ish gold along the southeast limb.
-the other Doug
This was the best I got, quite a lot of high cloud so very hazy, cloud thickened approaching totality didn't see anything there after
Eclipse was due between 01.30 and 05.00 here, so I took the next day off work in anticipation of being too tired after watching the eclipse to function... needn't have bothered, because after 2 weeks of almost perfectly clear nighttime skies here in the Lakes the cloud rolled back in Wednesday night like that scene from Independance Day when the alien ship glides over the mountains, and by 2am next morning the sky was just a flat dome of orange. No hope of seeing anything.
Then to rub salt into the wound, I couldn't even enjoy my day off because a workman spent the whole day digging up my living room floor, looking for the water pipe that was leaking into the shop beneath my flat, so I spent the whole day tramping around town keeping out of his way, in the rain, going back every hour to find yet more devastation...
Great weather tuesday night, good weather thursday night, BLOTTO wednesday night. grrrrrrr.
(Another ancient thread rises from the dead...)
For fun I can update this 7 year old thread to mention I'm working on a lunar eclipse model. It's possible for me to render images of the moon seen from Earth, and I'm starting to work on the Earth seen from the moon. Here is a work in progress of a view of Earth from the moon just barely inside the umbra. It still has a bit of aliasing to address. Careful inspection will show a white outer ring, a bluish middle region (from ozone) and a darker red inner region (within the troposphere). This run is without clouds, but does have some stratospheric aerosols.
cool
Celestia gives i interesting view for the April 4 2015 eclipse
-- as seen from the Moon - and like the above image they are dark
http://imgbox.com/7REgAFZE http://imgbox.com/gsEr970J
now there is limited atmosphere simulation at a distance
Thanks for the Celestia view. This provides a reminder that it would be nice to add in a representation of the solar corona, as the brightness range of the rendered image allows.
I mentioned this model in passing to Emily at the AGU conference and she posed the question of whether Earth city lights would be visible on the moon during totality. As an example, I found a http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1111/08SETI/ where it states Tokyo would appear +23.7 magnitude from 30AU away. This translates to about magnitude +9.8 as seen from the moon, below naked eye visibility. Additionally I believe there would be significant glare from the ring of light refracting through Earth's atmosphere making this more difficult to see in practice, depending on how deeply immersed the observer is in the umbra. The apparent magnitude of the developing ring is about -20 for an observer on the edge of the umbra and -15 for an observer in the center (about the full moon seen from Earth). The latter value is somewhat tricky to specify due to the deep red color, meaning the apparent magnitude can deviate from the "visual" V-band magnitude.
Here is an image similar to post #27 with some of the antialiasing measures applied:
With several further refinements, here is now an animation of the eclipse seen from the moon:
Below we can see both the total and partial phases of the eclipse seen from the moon. During the partial phase the sun's disk is set to about 255 counts. During the total phase, the brightness is increased depending on how deeply in the umbra the observer is located, up to a factor of 70 for center of the umbra perspective.
As noted above, Lunar eclipses are a favorite subject of mine. Here is an animated study of the visual aspects of Lunar eclipses set to music I recently created. My impression of the appearance of the Earth from the Moon in such circumstances is highlighted, a sight that I hope that will one day be properly captured with a suitable high dynamic range camera.
https://vimeo.com/188736414
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.
Below is a cropped view of an 8K animation zooming in along the Earth's limb at a scale of 1.6km per pixel, rotated 90 degrees clockwise. The first frame has the apparent sun about 45km off the limb (true sun 28km) though we're still technically in the umbra here. The edge of the umbra happens when the sun is about 85km up by the most widely used definition. We can see the sun is bright at the top where there is little extinction in the upper stratosphere. Below that is a blue layer due to ozone absorption in the lower stratosphere. The lowest part of the sun is red due to Rayleigh scattering in the lower troposphere just above the Earth's surface. The slight reddening effect of solar limb darkening isn't yet included in this model.
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