Catching the Super Blue Blood Moon

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Super Blue Blood Moon

A Rare Celestial Event

On the night of January 31, 2018, the cosmos put on a show that had skywatchers buzzing for weeks. It wasn't just any ordinary total lunar eclipse; astronomers officially dubbed it a "Super Blue Blood Moon". That meant three distinct lunar events coincided all at once: a perigee supermoon (when the moon is closest to Earth in its orbit), a blue moon (the second full moon in a single calendar month), and a total lunar eclipse.

Standing in my backyard, which is actually the 2nd tee at Crow Canyon Country Club, is the perfect, flat empty place where I almost always went to check out the full moon every month. Maybe photograph it… but probably not. After chasing so many landscapes to enhance, support or lift my phototoghy of the full moon rising, I guess complacency had set in so when I was home, I never paid much attention to shooting the moon locally.

So, I wasn’t ready when I went out that night, a little later than planned, to see the progress of the eclipse. Looking up into the crisp winter sky, I was instantly struck and knew I had to capture the moment before anything happened to the magical light bouncing from the moon onto the wispy high clouds. Of less concern, but also a factor, was the earth’s shadow creeping to completely engulfed the lunar surface.

What Makes Those Awesome Clouds

The local topography around Danville, Mt. Diablo the dominant feature, can bring in swift atmospheric shifts, and on this particular night, thin high-altitude wisps of cloud drifted directly across the moon's path. While photographers often cringe when clouds roll in, these wisps actually created a stunning natural diffraction pattern, catching the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the bright portion of the moon while softening the transition into the coppery shadow of Earth.

My Mistake: Too Late to the Wrong Party

Not getting out early enough to see what was unfolding. That’s the complacency, I guess. Sometimes I tell myself, “when you’ve seen one full moon, you’ve seen them all.” Of course, the complacency leads to not packing my gear and being at a location that could result in a worthy photo. That takes a little planning and sometimes an easy hike. The location planning I do with the app, TPE (The Photographer’s Ephemeris). Then I use Photo Pills to verify the location after arriving so that I can plant my tripod and get setup for the shot I visualize before the moon crests the horizon.

Didn’t make a plan for this full moon. I was at the wrong party; my backyard #2 tee observation pad, instead of a scouted location. So my image doesn’t have the kind of landscape I like to feature in my photos. At first, it felt like I had missed the opportunity of bagging something intentional and amazing.

Now, eight years later, I view it as serendipity. This phase of the eclipse, accompanied by those clouds are enough. Any landscape element other than what I had at that moment, a black silhouette of trees, would be too much. Turned out that I was on time to the right party after all.

How My Brain Worked on this Shot

Shooting lunar eclipses requires a careful balance of camera settings because it moves surprisingly fast across the sky. For this shot, I locked my Olympus E-M1 onto a solid tripod and paired it with and my trusty M.Zuiko 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO lens, set right at 105mm. Because the bright side of the moon can easily blow out while trying to expose for the dark shadowed side, I settled on f/5.6 and dialed in a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second at native ISO 200. This allowed me to keep the moon sharp without introducing motion blur from Earth's rotation, while preserving the delicate texture of those glowing high-altitude clouds.

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