The Lunar Eclipse

We are talking sacrifice here!  I set the alarm this morning for 4:30 AM!  I quickly dressed and loaded my camera equipment and tripods into the car, and then headed for this beach and boat ramp in Glen Cove.  I had scouted the location a week before and what I liked were the pilings in the center of the photograph, sticking up above the horizon.  I thought those pilings might add interest to the photograph.  But it turns out I needed to be further away from them to get this wide angle view and so they didn't really play a part in my eclipse photos.  So this is shortly after the total eclipse started at 5:16 AM.  You can see that the moon is orange, instead of white, meaning that it is in the shadow of the earth.

So this is a photograph of the fully eclipsed moon taken with my 300mm lens.  If you enlarge this image by clicking on it, you can see a few stars in the background.  This was taken at 5:30 AM.

And this photo was taken at 5:46 as the sky got brighter as dawn approached.  The Moon is lower as it begins setting, so I used a longer lens, and so the moon is larger, which is nice.  As 6:00 AM approached, the sky became lighter and the eclipsed moon gradually faded and disappeared.  An astounding morning, and certainly worth getting up early for!