Total Lunar Eclipse
20 Jan. 2019

The evening was looking bad at sunset (above left) and after moonrise (above right). I began to wonder if I had made a mistake making the 2 hour drive out to my observatory...

But luckily, as the early evening eclipse progressed, the clouds did yield enough breaks to see the eclipse and even allow the stars to be seen at mid-eclipse, though a high haze still made photography a problem. To see what the entire sky looked like during the eclipse see the 360° panorama.

The eclipsed moon is at lower left. Auriga, Orion, Canis Major and other constellations were visible at mid-eclipse.

The shot at right was taken by Jean, who watched the eclipse from our home in Cerritos. The quality of this hand-held, Pixel 3 cell phone shot shows how well Google's image processing handles low-light photos. The photo shown is straight from the cell phone (no post-processing), except for a reduction in size. Note that even the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini were captured.

As if to emphasize how lucky the night had been for me, immediately after the partial umbral phase ended, clouds enveloped my observing site, making even the neighboring observatories fade into the fog.

This photo above was taken just before midnight by moonlight after the full moon had re-emerged from the Earth's shadow (8-sec. exposure).