Saturday, February 11, 2017

Snow Moon on a Dimmer, Sort Of


I suspect that you had to be living in a hole somewhere the past couple days to avoid hearing all about last night not only being a full moon, the snow moon, but that at moonrise there would also be a penumbral eclipse.

Anyway, we were out at sunset/moonrise yesterday because, while not exactly rare, stuff like this doesn't happen every day.



Since the moon was only going to be in the earth's penumbral just after moonrise, the viewing window was narrow. (OK, I'm sure someone has a very good reason for getting all fancy about it, but why not just say 'earth's partial shadow' instead of this prenuptual - prenumber - premature (Oh wait! that's never good so don't even think it!!) thing??)

In order for us to see anything close to the actual moonrise around here we have to walk five or six hundred feet of winding, tree-lined driveway all the way up the hill to the gate, then look through the trees along the fence-line of the ranch across the county road.



Since we can only get glimpses of the actual moonrise through the branches we had a limited view of the eclipse during it's peak.



And by the time the moon got above the treeline



there wasn't much eclipse left to be seen. (That shadow on the bottom-right is a branch, not some weird space thingy.)



But that's OK because the moon can, and should, be appreciated at any of it's stages. (Even when it tricks me into thinking it's sunrise and has me up at 2 in the morning, because we all know that 3 or 4 hours of sleep is plenty. . .Oh who am I kidding! At my age that's just enough to make me good and grumpy!!)



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