Most of the images on this site involve objects millions of light years away, hours of exposure, and a fairly involved relationship with processing software. On August 27, I photographed something a little closer to home: the lunar eclipse. This time, the camera was my Canon Rebel T4i with an ordinary zoom lens. The exposure? One second. A fairly substantial departure from my usual imaging statistics.Although widely described as a “Blood Moon,” this was technically a partial lunar eclipse. Nearly the entire Moon entered Earth’s dark inner shadow (the umbra), but a small portion remained outside it. Close to total, but the distinction matters when explaining what we’re looking at. NASA’s eclipse overview has a good explanation of the different types.So why does something sitting in Earth’s shadow turn red instead of disappearing? Our atmosphere scatters blue light more readily, while allowing more red and orange light through. It also bends some of that light into the shadow and onto the Moon. It’s the same basic reason sunsets look red. The color we photograph on the lunar surface has effectively been filtered by our own atmosphere.And why doesn’t this happen every full Moon? The Moon’s orbit is tilted about 5 degrees relative to Earth’s path around the Sun. Most months, it passes above or below our shadow. An eclipse requires the full Moon and the orbital alignment to coincide. Again,NASA explains the geometry and color here.

For the tech specs....this shot used no telescope - just a Canon EOS Rebel T4i, 18–135mm f/3.5–5.6 stock lens, set to 81mm, using an intervalometer and RAW format. The capture settings were a single 1-second exposure at f/5.6 and ISO 800. A considerably shorter focal length than the telescopes behind most of my galaxy and nebula images.