What compels a guy who actually celebrates a satisfying night’s sleep to crawl out of his warm and comfortable bed in the middle of a cold night and cower outside, shivering, for hours?
How about a rare winter solstice lunar eclipse that only happens every 350 years? Yup, that’ll do it, at least for that repressed photojournalist buried deep inside of me clamoring to come out.
In fact, even though I didn’t remain awake and exposed to the elements for the entire three hour event, I captured the highlights with digital camera, zoom lens, tripod and remote trigger.
There are a few things that make a lunar eclipse particularly and uniquely 
interesting to a photographer.
First, unlike a solar eclipse, it lasts a good long while, so set-up and capture can be a leisurely activity.
Second, the lunar landscape changes color rather dramatically as the event unfolds. This happens because the moon radiates the reflected hues of solar light arriving from the earth since in this case, the earth is precisely between the sun and the moon.
Such a scenario makes for some exciting changes in illumination of the moon’s otherwise monochromatic surface, and in a rather historically significant manner, no less.
Notice in the partially eclipsed image above, the orange hue with a bluish tinge at the border between light and dark? Fascinating. Not only does the moon affect the depth of earth’s oceans, but in the case of a lunar eclipse, it would appear that the oceans also affect the moon – at least chromatically.
What paints a profound sense of fascination with such astronomical events on the minds of mere mortals? The fact that we’re witnessing a moment in time that will not manifest itself again for centuries? Might this be a feeble attempt at pretending immortality, or a grand gesture of offering our children a glimpse of the future? Do we greedily grasp at something larger than one tiny snapshot of time’s incessant passage by preserving such moments, perhaps reminding ourselves that we are indeed a part of that, if only as a temporal observer?
At least I captured a picture of it with my humble kit, as the Brits would say, and it gives me great pleasure to share it with you, with pen in hand,
Gene
P.S. Honor me by perusing some of my other images at www.GeneJurrensPhotography.com.
