2017/7/14/07061262 1154120522 Thanx Anderson. 70m pixels. Starting first at 1min 32sec. Including 1 minute 15sec of the crescent. Image credit: Thanx Anderson/BibleHub/Google
While people weren’t actually able to watch the total eclipse of the moon on Friday, July 27, the totality of the event was visible from 11 states in eastern United States — but only in the western half of the country. That lasted for about an hour and a half.
Image credit: Christopher Sparks/NASA/Gizmodo
The total eclipse begins at -1.3 minutes, so I stayed up a little later than usual that night to grab a good location. I ventured out to the backyard of The Church of the Risen Christ in Tucson, Arizona. However, I decided to check it out from the backyard of my house, so I started with a dive to get a perfect view.
I didn’t notice the moon’s edge until I was about halfway along the park to the church. It wasn’t until the second or third quarter of the eclipse that it became pretty clear, if you squint a little bit, you can see the edges. You can also see a point across the sky where the sun’s “diamond ring” at the beginning of the eclipse and the moon as it passes through the centre of the ring. Here’s an old video, thanks to Pat Dye, for more details.
The small moon was a bit larger than the sun. In this case, that made it hard to see, even though the partial-observance was comparatively visible. To get even more detail, you can turn around and look at the solar corona which is visible through our device.
The next time we can see a total eclipse of the moon — which will be in July 2024 — I hope to be back to be in the San Francisco, California sky. This time we’ll be getting the view from both north and south, so hopefully more people can catch it.
•The Risen Christ Church