101 three sixty five

Forget detail, I was just looking for a disk! There it was, lurking behind several curtains of cloud.

But after a while, I was convinced the lower left of the moon was being eaten, since there was always a shadow there, but the shadows changed everywhere else.

Yep! The eclipse was definately underway.

Finally (by sheer force of will, I'm sure - I even blew on the clouds) the moon broke clear of the heavy cloud (there was still considerable atmospheric haze) and I could put the resolving power of the 400mm f/5.6 to work.

The moon was moving slowly, so I looked around from the third floor balcony. On the mezzanine to the second floor a student came out to watch the moon on a five minute break from class.

Back at the moon, a spooky red ball was growing under this unnatural cresent moon.

Soon the shadow was very cose to the edge of the moon.

At he moment the shadow coveed the last bit of the moon, I took the following overexposed photograph. Although, kind of ugly in a pictoral sense, this photo is useful because it sets a celestial time mark precisely - it called the second contact the moment when the moon is completely covered by the umbra of the earth's shadow. There are a couple of stars visible in the frame, so the position of the moon can be set exactly from my position at 112.0509° W and 33.2958° N. For you Copernicans, this tells you where to set the gears.

Finally the moon slipped into totality. It also became much dimmer than it had been during the partial phases, meaning the exposure needed increased, but I didn't want to push the twenty nine dollar 400 too much, so I kept it at f/11 and tried increasing the ISO (from 400 in the previous shots to 1600) to get this grainy orb:
Then, with the ISO set to 640, and the shutter to six seconds this blury photo appeared:

All of the above made with D100 and a Vivitar 400mm f/5.6 at f/11 and shutter speeds from 1/80 second to 6 seconds.
The dim red moon hung over the city, dodging clouds for the next hour and a half.

D100 with a 35mm f/2 at f/3.5 and a six second shutter speed at ISO 400.
Just befor third contact (the end of totality) the clouds socked in and the temperature dropped. Summer's finally over in Phoenix.

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