Lunar eclipse

If you happened to be passing the empty cattle field adjacent to my house at around 4 o'clock this morning and looked up in the branches of a deadfall, you'd have seen me balancing my binoculars, video camera, and still camera. I was trying to get a picture of the Lunar Eclipse. This type of eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the moon and sun blocking sunlight from hitting the moon. Since the moon is almost entirely full, the effect was pretty good. I took around 30 pictures. Three of the stills turned out pretty well, and the video camera captured the eclipse nicely (despite me saying "January 4th, 2012" when it is clearly June). There were a few wispy clouds at first, but it cleared nicely.

The eclipse is not "total." In fact only 37 percent of the moonlight was shadowed by the Earth.

The sky has been good to us. Two weeks ago we had the Solar Annular Eclipse here in Utah. We are unlikely to see anything like that in my lifetime in our neck of the woods. On June 5th we get the Transit of Venus, which will not happen for over 100 years. And this morning (June 4) we had the partial Lunar Eclipse. It's amazing to me that these once in a lifetime events happened so closely together. It's also pretty awesome how exactly they can be predicted!