Moon me!

The full Super Moon of September 17th is known as the Harvest Moon and the Blood Moon. 

I've missed quite a few moon rises this year because I just didn't feel like going up to the ridge to wait on the moonrise. 

This was my first glimpse of the moon after it came up out of the river mists from the valley below.

I stopped on my way home...

I don't know if there was smoke in the air or what, but it sure was orange at first! Perhaps this is how it earns the 'Blood Moon' moniker.

I was determined to stay up and see the partial eclipse. I've done moon eclipses before and over the years I struggled with photographing it. 

Practice, practice, and practice helps. So I gave it another go.

I took some stages of the moon and then overlayed them on one black background to try to simulate what I saw over an hour. The shots started at 9:00 PM and went through until about 10:15 PM.

This morning's moon was surrounded slightly by a hazy sky but I took one last shot of it anyway...

One Longgg Day

I woke up at 4ish something o'clock, that gave me time to drink my decafe and pretend that it was caffiene coffee thta would give me a jump start on the day. Sunday was the lunar eclipse day! Yipee! I get excited about the strange things.

Charlie and I went for a nice early morning walk to check out the different trees I had tried to ID last year to see if I'd learned anything. 

By 7, I'd finished up my crazy Saturday blog stuff and went out to wash stock tanks and move critters around. Well. Let's keep it short. I was like a busy bee all morning.

I promised myself that I'd take a midafternoon nap because I wanted to stay up and watch the lunar eclipse. Hah. I didn't take a nap. I went Morel hunting and it was a flop!

Me, waiting for the sunset before watching the moon come up.

Sunset:

Moon rise...I was afraid the clouds would cover it all up but we got lucky!

The photos didn't turn out that well. I am not that great at doing moon shoots yet. The clarity still evades me, but these are some samples of what I got.

I tried to get the clouds moving through and it just really flubbed up the photo! 

The following is 57 seconds of the first half of the eclipse. It is wiggly because the moon of course kept moving out of frame. IF I had a movie/video editing program I suppose I could have edited the clips to make them all nice looking. However I rarely do any video work. ON1 has a nice time lapse feature which I used to do the sunset ~~ that was 27 seconds in camera and like 3 seconds at the frame rate the program has for choices. 

Keep watching to the end because it looks like the moon disappears...it does into clouds but I recorded until it went black!

57 seconds of the eclipse:

I didn't get to bed until wayyyy past my bed time. 

Monday proved to be a most excellent day.  More on that tomorrow.

Babies, Blood Moon, and such like...

Welcome Sterling Edward to this life.  He had a bit of a rough start with an emergency C-section on September 30th.

There I am holding Sterling, next to me is Samantha the proud mom... step sister Lily, and Sterling's sister Elena!

It was a whirlwind few days of lots of emotion and happiness.

~~~~~~~

It was all over the news, the last lunar eclipse of the year was Wednesday morning.
I checked the NASA site for estimated times and set my alarm for 4am.  At 4:15, I could see the shadow beginning so I made coffee and made the decision to await until the shadow had nearly covered the moon.

I drove to the ridge top and parked on the gravel road with the moon now turning orange.
So I kept trying exposures until finally I nailed a keeper.

It was still well before dawn.  I think this shot was taken about 5:15AM.

Worth the wait and the nearly frozen hands!  The moon was dim enough that it did not blot out all of the surrounding stars.

I patiently waited until the glow in the east started.

As the sun rose the moon dropped and returned to its normal color with the lower half still either in shadow or in atmospheric haze.

I finished up by jumping into the car and going to a higher viewpoint to watch the moon sink into the trees and out of sight.

Last night I made an attempt to catch yet another full moon after it peered down into our hollow.

It turned out more like a Halloween Shot instead.  Of course, I didn't use a tripod and the clouds were not exactly cooperating.

Today is supposed to be in the 50's.  Perfect for poking about in the woods to find colors.

Perhaps Morris, my assistant will come along and we can start photographing the new book in his series of adventures with toys....

It should be fun!