Full lunar eclipse, Phoenix, AZ - 27 October 2004 7:41 MST
(2:41 Zulu 28 October 2004)
Occasionally there is a full eclipse of the moon. As it happened on
27 October 2004, the moon peaked out behind the clouds for a brief moment
during the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals.
This photo was taken from a Nikon Coolpix 5700 using an 8 second exposure.
Four "hot-pixels" can be seen in the lower left of the picture. Had
it not been cloudy when this photo was taken (and perhaps at a darker sky
than Phoenix), stars would have been visible. Usually the contrast
between a full moon and the star background is too bright to have both the
stars and the moon visible in the same photo (without a clever photo doctor).
A lunar eclipse always happens when there is a full moon, since the Earth
blocks the sun from the moon during an eclipse of the moon, and to do this,
the moon must be located on the far side of the Earth that is away from the
sun and this just happens to be when the moon would normally be full. Of
course, we don't see an eclipse of the moon every month because the moon,
Earth and sun are not exactly coplanar. (During a total solar eclipse,
the moon blocks out the sun from a very small portion of the Earth.)
The clouds came in directly behind this photo ... photo courtesy of NOAA.
