Lunar Eclipse, NOT Mars

A friend and I spent the small hours between 1:00 and 6:00 this morning photographing the total lunar eclipse from an excellent vantage point in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. The red coloration when the moon is in "totality", or completely eclipsed in the Earth's umbral shadow, is caused by the way particles in the Earth's atmosphere diffract light on its way to the moon and refract indirect light reflecting from the moon's surface. Depending on global cloud coverage and airborne particulates, eclipsed moons can vary in color from light orange to brick red to dark brown.

My rig included a tripod, Canon EOS 5D and Canon 400mm f/5.6 L lens. For the partial eclipse images I shot between 1/400 and 1/160 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 100. For the images in which the moon was mostly or completely eclipsed I used a shutter speed of 1 second at f/5.6 and ISO 400 or 650. With a focal length of 400mm, 1 second was the slowest shutter speed I could use to avoid blurring caused by the movement of the moon in the sky. An image was taken every 10 minutes. This compilation was constructed in Photoshop from selected images showing the progression of the moon's pass through Earth's shadow.

Despite being THE topic of conversation among eclipse watchers, Mars did not appear in the sky as large as the moon as many people believed it would. This urban legend started in 2003 when Earth passed Mars at a distance of around 35 million miles, close enough for it to look as large as the moon THROUGH A SMALL TELESCOPE! Since then emails touting the Mars hoax have circulated cyberspace every summer and every year millions of people get fished in. Mars, being roughly the size of the moon, would have to be nearly as close to appear as large. This would require that either Mars or Earth travel tens of millions of miles out of its orbit, creating all kinds of havoc in the solar system, an event that would surely get nearly as much news coverage as Paris Hilton's prison diary. Hopefully we wouldn't have to learn of such an event via a chain email.