Full moon AND total lunar eclipse on Dec. 21

[Tom Dunlap]

This Solstice brings three events together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2010_lunar_eclipse

Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The next day means summer is a day closer. Hard to remember that if you live above the snow line in the past few days in US and the past few weeks in Europe.

For the past fifteen months I've taken a set of pics and stitched them together on Solstice and Equinox. Seeing how far the sun moves up the horizon is amazing. I think it's about 30 degrees of travel! The university has a three story parking ramp that is a great view site of the horizon. The campus is on one of the high points in Austin which helps a lot.

Full moon! I love to see the moon rise, especially in the winter. There have been several winter camping trips on the MN/Ontario border that coincided with the full moon. Very pretty.

NOw I find out that there is a total lunar eclipse at about 2am that same night. I know where I'll be...and I'll be a little tired the next day too.

 

[Frax]

Can you post that image Tom?
I plotted the sun's altitude throughout the last year as a graph. 62 degrees above the horizon on summer solstice, and ony 16 degrees on the winter solstice up here.
Tried to spot the Geminid meteor shower last night but I diodn't see anything.
I saw the Leonids a few years ago and it was like giant firebombs being lobbed from horizon to horizon. Most amazing natural phenomenon I ever saw.

 

[Tom Dunlap]

Nora,

The pics are really wide because I take 6-7 images and stitch them...let me try.

My goal is to capture the first light of the sun right on the horizon. I've had to wait a couple of days because of clouds right on the horizon.

My idea is to get good panoramas for the Eq/Sol sunrise and make a four panel poster. Some of the pics I've got look good on my computer, I wonder what they would look like on print.

This is from Summer Solstice 2010. The winter sunrise lines up with the buildings on the horizon on the right side.

Now that I have markers for the sunrise locations I might try to aim my camera at the mid-point of the sun's travel so that all of the pics are centered. That will show the horizon travel better.

 

[Frax]

Very nice work Tom!