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| 8/27/26 partial lunar eclipse |
Not paying attention to the time, I nearly missed last Thursday’s
partial lunar eclipse when a text from a friend reminded me to look out the
window. Luckily, the sky was clear at exactly 9:12 p.m. PT, when 96.2 percent
of the moon was obscured – the peak of the near-total eclipse. I knew I would
be asleep by the time it looked interesting again, so I was happy to catch this
much.
Back in January 2019, I made a series of sketches of a total lunar eclipse that had begun earlier in the evening.
I took off on my evening walk about 8:45 and when I turned back on one stretch, there was the moon just barely above the treeline edging its way to as eclipsed as it was going to get. I headed down another direction where I knew there'd be no trees to block the view and continue watching until I figured it had reached its peak, chatting a bit with a couple who had come out of the apartment complex to watch. "How many miles is the moon away from earth?" the man asked me, his smile indicating he didn't really expect me to know and I did not. Like you, I was not going to stand there waiting for it to unwind itself as I've sat through other eclipses start to finish and didn't figure I'd see anything new. Also like you, I was rather delighted with our clear skies. It seems like 90% of celestial events go unseen in my neck of the woods do to clouds. My one surprise was the direction the eclipse moved. For some reason I expected it to go left to right, not from bottom up.
ReplyDeleteGlad you caught some of it! I've been disappointed by many, many celestial or lunar events that I couldn't see due to clouds, so it's always a treat when I can see it!
DeleteGlad you got to capture a bit of it. I didn't bother going out this time.
ReplyDelete