Last night I went out before the eclipse and took a few practice shots. You can see them at: Eclipse Practice

The sky was a little bit hazy when I went out to practice, and unfortunately was starting to really get hazy when I went out to start watching the eclipse.

This is not want you want to see when you want to get pictures of the moon. A ring around the moon can be beautiful, but not what I wanted to take pictures of.

The spot of light above the moon is Mars. You will see more of Mars later in the post.

I tried to capture the moon as it went through the phases toward a total eclipse, but the haze was not cooperating very well. Here is one picture that I took when it was close to half way covered. It was difficult to focus on the moon when you couldn’t see the detail.

I had better luck getting Mars to show up in my pictures. In the picture above you can really see the red disk of mars, but again the moon is behind the haze.

I would have liked to see this view without the haze. I am sure that it would have been very beautiful. I could not even focus with my binoculars. It was just too hazy.

I like that I caught the moon with just a sliver of sunlight coming through.

With the light of the moon diminished you could start to see Spica through the haze.

Spica is the brightest start in the constellation Virgo and one of the 20 brightest stars in the night sky. It seemed very bright this morning in relation to the moon.

In this picture you can see the night sky from the perspective that I was taking pictures. I was in the walkway between my house and my neighbors house to have the darkest possible location to shoot from.

You can really see that the sky is hazy and it was rapidly getting worse as the night wore on.

Here is one of the last shots I was able to get of the moon before the haze started to thicken into clouds. As I watched the eclipse progress and light start to return I could barely see the moon.

For this shot I had to learn how to set up my camera to use manual focus. The auto-focus would not work at all, and even with the manual focus there was very little detail to work with through the haze.

I will leave you with one last image that was one of my favorites of the night.

Here we have the Blood Red Moon with Spica only two degrees to the right. Then up above we see Mars, the Red Planet.

I am hoping that the next eclipse will come when there are clear skies. I probably should also buy a tripod before then :-).

Did you get to see the eclipse?

Steven