I had been waiting for this eclipse for quite sometime. My goal was to purchase a nice telescope and equipment to photograph the event and other such events. With the purchase of an 8inch SkyQuest last spring and a digital camera (Canon Powershot) for christmas I was almost all set. My next purchase was a Steadypix to put my digital camera right up to the eyepiece. 

Lunar Eclipses are quite nice from city limits. So I had to decide whether to see the event from Houston, Texas or go out to dark skies. The full moon washes out many stars. During a lunar eclipse, if it gets dark enough, more stars are seen. With this in mind a plan was formulated to venture out into the country-side to see the eclipse from dark skies. By the time we arrived to our location the eclipse had already began. The setup was across from a windmill near Columbus, Texas. 

Color was seen early in the eclipse and through binoculars a blue/purple color was observed, which was quite impressive. The shadow continued across the moon and the moon grew darker and darker until it was immersed in a dark red color. It was so much darker than other lunar eclipses I'd viewed. The Summer Milky Way, through Cygnus, was easily viewable and quite stunning, once the moon was totally eclipsed. It was hard to keep my eyes from drifting back and forth from the eclipsed moon to the Milky Way behind me. STUNNING!!!!

The views through my telescope were wonderfully crisp and full of color. The plan was to watch until 11pm. However, the show was just to good and that time was pushed back quite a bit. While watching the moon emerging from the shadow, greens and blues could be seen. 

It was the best Total Lunar Eclipse I'd ever seen! I got home and downloaded images from my digicam and was quite pleased with the results:) Since then I've used my Steadypix to photograph sunspots (note: this can be dangerous if not practiced properly see my solar page for more information). But that's another story. ;)

Thanks for visiting and reading!