Last night was a very interesting night. It seems not many people here in Egypt were aware that the Earth would cast its shadow on its nearest neighbor, the moon. Or may be no one was interested. It started at about 3:30am here in Cairo. It started like this:
This was the first thing I saw as I switched off the movie and looked up. I had been watching a movie as I waited for the eclipse to begin. The shadow appeared on the rim of the silver sphere. It slowly made its way further and further across the bright silver moon.
I struggled to capture decent photos of the eclipse with my primitive automated cybershot. I tried my best and to be honest I was happy with the outcome. My other visual aid was my telescope. I set it up on a tripod on my roof ready to watch the event. I've had this telescope since I was ten years old or something. It was a birthday gift from my father and the night I got it was one hell of a night. I could finally see the moon up close and see the dinosaur-looking or dragon-like craters of the glaring moon. Now, many years later I look up again at the glowing ball in the night's sky.
It's quite ironic that a few days earlier, unaware of the lunar eclipse coming up, I ordered a 90mm Mak-Cass telescope. Interesting that my interest in astronomy re-emerges just before this event. Another ironic thing is on the 21st of February 41 years ago the Apollo 1 was planned to launch but there were unfortunate events in one of the test runs leading to the death of some of the astronauts due to fatal errors in the designs of the Apollo command module.
So there I was freezing in the cold pre-dawn air. My hands were frozen blocks of ice and every time I looked into the eyepiece of my telescope the chilly metal would scorch my skin cold.
The star you see in the above image is Saturn. There is another bright star above the eclipsed moon that you cant see in the picture. This is Regulus (a bright star of the Leo constellation). Hopefully with the telescope I ordered, I'll be able to meet Saturn and Jupiter up close and personal :D.
The picture above is the last picture I took. It isn't clear at all but you can see that the moon has disappeared behind the shadow cloak of the earth all together.
The picture just below is the telescope I used to view the amazing experience.
It's a 20x50 refractor telescope which isn't too bad. You can see the moon fairly clearly. I still plan on buying a deep space Imager which is something you put on the eyepiece of the telescope and connect to a USB port in a computer. It allows you to take images using your telescope. I just hope my telescope gets here and the 6.3mm eyepiece I ordered along with it.
As you can see the moon turned dark orange as the full eclipse came into play. I was forced inside by the cold and so had to look up from my window. The full lunar eclipse was approximately at 5am. I had work early that day so I was forced to shut down my operations and get some rest.
It was definitely an interesting experience. It was so grand. So much bigger than us. I kept imaging the whole event up close, seeing the massive earth moving across the rays of the sun and cutting off light from the lunar disc. The disc darkened with the umbra of the shadow and the people on earth, so small and insignificant in the context of such a large-scale show, looked up in absolute awe.
