Celestia Forums

I'm sure most of you have heard about the moon eclipse tonight. Well, I went ahead and made a little video with celestia of what it will look like. The zip is about 4.5mb, but the actual video (once unzipped) is like 40mb. You can download it here: http://billybob884.web1000.com/moon%20eclipse.zip

Completely overcast here at the moment, but totally clear earlier. I wonder what it'll be like later on...

Billybob, your video doesn't show the moon going red I suppose does it?!

Hey Jack, the answer is no, it's just gray.

Thanks for the video Mike!

-Don G.

Why in celestia de moon is no totaly covered by earth's shadow???

Well, according to mine it is totally covered... Do you have ambient light on?

I just simulated this in Celestia, wow it looks good

just waiting to see it for real now, in about 1 hour.
I have never seen the moon turn red before, I hope this effect is put into Celestia sometime.

and its a real clear night here too

it has already started here, the moon is almost half way covered, no signs of red yet....

Sadly i'm going to have to watch the whole thing in celestia - raining here now...

Here it has begun, and the sky is perfectly clear... In reality the border of the shadow looks somewhat sharper than it looks in celestia.

Actually, for me celestia shows the moon what it looked like about 15 minutes ago, i.e. 0:30 UTC on screen looks like 0:15 UTC in reality.

Shadow is now covering about half of the moon, and i think the border of the moon in the shadows looks just a little bit red, but this could just be my imagination (or the cheap binoculars).

Live broadcast of the eclipse from the Mira Public Observatory, Grimbergen, Belgium

http://www3.mira.be/lunar-eclipse-031108/

(Reloads every 2 minutes)

So I guess this confirms just how far off the colors are in many astronomical pictures are

It's clear and icy cold here, so I'm watching from indoors with an old, small refractor. The moon is not as red as Mira's pictures suggest.

Oh, yeah- I should have mentioned that the colours were way off! The moon was blue a while ago, and suddenly turned red when nearing totality...

Not only red, but i saw a little green too. Truely beautiful. I tried to take some pictures, but I don't think they came out too well.... It's starting to return to normal, the shadow is slightly off it, still mostly covered.

Wow!!....missed all that...as usual...looking forward to te screenies or a cel!

Nearly sober...bh!

Howdy All,

Here's a view from the eastern plains of Colorado, USA. It was never totally eclipsed, as the white part moved from the lower right to the lower left with it being visible the entire time. But, the color was incredible!

This picture has not been adjusted in any way. It was taken with an Olympus D-450 ZOOM, 1.3 megapixel digital camera, at full optical-only zoom (3X) ...

-Don G.

selden wrote:So I guess this confirms just how far off the colors are in many astronomical pictures are

But is it off in the pictures, or in our eyes/brain? AFAIK under low-light conditions like an eclipsed moon our ability to detect colors isn't that good.

Well i managed to see about five seconds of an orange moon,
Then the clouds rolled in, never to be seen again

at least I saw it briefly.

When the moon rised it was cloudy, but not too much, i could stil see the moon. At 11 pm it was very cloudy and i could not see i tany more. The i went to sleep. I put the clock alarm at 2:15am(when the moon was partialy covered, i am on GMT+2) but it was cloudy. the clodus were moving so i waited 15 minutes, but nothing. I got back to sleep very ver disapointed. i could not sleep, so at 3am i came up again. it was less cloudy, but the moon was not visible yet. I think that it could not see it also because i was in a window, and maybe my bulding "ocultated" it, so i think i would go down, but when i saw that it was cloudy, i decided no to go down, it was very cold and i had to change cloths, and i was very tired.
i hope i will see the next one, on may...

I was lucky enough to have clear skies all night! I watched it (all two hours of it)! As you can see I had alot to do last night. billybob884, I videotaped the last one I saw in Bermuda Sept. 1996. I would show the vacation video at parties once in a while....Hmm, and the parties would break-up approximately 30 to 40 minutes into the eclipse. I thought the narrative was pretty good!

Hmm... I never saw it get that red, it only looked a little tinted pink. But the actual eclipse was pretty nice.