The three and a half hours of eclipse time for Friday’s event, 580 years in the making, is a rare choreography of both planetary alignment and the moon’s slightly unbalanced orbit around Earth.

The second slowest eclipse of the century, before Friday’s, happened in 2018 and lasted one hour and 43 minutes. But they usually last for far shorter durations. Lunar eclipses happen roughly two times a year when Earth falls directly between the moon and sun - for instance, there was a total lunar eclipse in May that was also a supermoon. Overlay, or “stack” those images together in photo editing software to create a classic lunar eclipse image. If you stick around for all six hours - without moving your camera - you will have 12 photos, each with the moon placed in a slightly different part of the sky. If possible, tweak your camera’s time-lapse settings (or use a remote controlled shutter with an interval) to automatically take a photo every 30 or so minutes throughout each phase of the lunar eclipse. Set your camera on a tripod with a wide shot of the sky, framing the moon somewhere in the middle. Kraus said.Ī more ambitious photographic trick requires photo editing software to create a composite image, or multiple photos merged into one frame, that shows the full sequence of a lunar eclipse. If your digital camera has a timer or if you have a remote cable for snapping images, you can get “clear images without motion blur from bumping your camera,” Mr. But on Friday, like a big planetary filter, sunlight will beam through the brim of Earth’s atmosphere and project sunset colors on the lunar surface. On normal nights, the moon gets its white glow in the night sky when sunlight reflects from its surface. Light waves from the sun appear in hues of blue when they beam directly through the atmosphere during the day, and appear yellowish to reddish during sunset as they shoot through thicker swaths of the atmosphere. The colors are a result of the same effect that gives sunsets on Earth hues of pink, red and magenta, a process called Rayleigh scattering. “If the skies are clear, it’s worth getting up for, even early in the morning,” said Allyson Bieryla, an astronomer who manages telescopes at Harvard University’s Astronomy Lab.

Why does the moon change colors during a lunar eclipse?ĭuring the eclipse’s peak, the moon will appear in deep hues of red and orange, blushing the surface of the near side that faces our planet in a sheen of colored sunlight filtered by Earth’s atmosphere.

How to use eclipse on surface 3