Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse

 

Full Moon 2 Mar 2026


Lunar Eclipse, 3 Mar 2026

Totality for the Lunar Eclipse was supposed to be about 04:38 MST on the morning of 3 March. I wasn't sure if I would be able to stay up to see it, or get up in time. From the altitude for the time, it looked like it would be touch and go for it being above the trees on the hill to the west. I did decide ahead of time that if I did watch it I would try to get some images with our DSLR, a Canon T7. We have a 75-300mm zoom lens for it. I went out early to try it out by taking pictures of the full moon. I initially accidentally took several images in JPEG format before I realized it, and reset the camera to RAW. Lens set at 300mm, F5.6, ISO 100, shutter speed to 1/250. The camera was on a tripod, and had it set for a 4 second delay since I was having to press the release on the camera.

I decided to go ahead and go to bed, but the dogs woke me up about 03:30, so I decided to get up and watch the eclipse.  The Moon was further above the trees than I had expected. I set the camera up near the east end of the property on the road. This gained me a few more degrees of viewing time. I started taking images with the shutter speed set at 1/100. I watched until a few minutes past totality,when the Moon started  to go into the trees. The Moon never got to the "blood red" talked about so often. Instead it was sort of a ruddy brownish color. To me the most striking view was the brilliant flash of the last sliver of fully illuminated surface just as it passed into totality, and the same effect when it passed out of totality.

One result of this night is that it made me more interested in using the DSLR to get images of the Moon. 







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