Photo Credit: Candace 12-21-10

The 2010 Winter Solstice Total Lunar Eclipse is over and I’m sure we’re all recovering from a serious lack of sleep!   What a night!  The above photo was submitted by Candace who says she used a Canon Rebel T2i without a telephoto lens to capture the event.  As you can see, the moon is completely in the Earth’s shadow – or umbra – and is displaying the characteristic red-orange hue.  Thanks for the picture!

We got a lot of feedback from our readers.  Seems like folks in northern Canada and Florida had good weather and clear skies and got a great view of the eclipse, whereas people in the US  Midwest and West Coast had mostly overcast skies and missed the entire event.  The international headquarters of Outer Space Universe is located in the Midwest of the United States and as luck would have it, we were subjected to mostly overcast skies with an abundance of low hanging clouds.   Yeah, I know, not the best location for observing astronomical events!

The best shot I could get!

Anyway…. I ventured outside around 2am and spent about an hour waiting for breaks in the clouds.   Mind you, it was about 15 degrees F!  I had my Nikon D300 ready for any glimpse of the eclipsed moon.  The best I could come up with was this fuzzy, partially cloud covered image.  Not what I was hoping for!

Nonetheless, it was great fun waiting for the eclipsed moon to emerge from behind the clouds and it gave me a chance to enjoy the winter solstice during the deepest darkest part of the night.  I also feel good knowing that the day light is finally going to start getting longer again here AND the next total lunar eclipse visible in the Americas is only four years away!  Mark your calendars for April 15, 2014.

So if any of you did a better job getting a picture of the eclipse than I did, send it in!  I’ll make sure we get it posted.

Liz, from New Jersey, sent us this picture.  She says that she took this picture using her 35mm digital Sony camera.

Photo Credit: Liz from NJ

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