As I drove home last night after a long day in theatre, I noticed the full moon had a bit of a shadow across it. Of course! It was the eclipse – I’d forgotten all about it.
By now it was well after my bedtime, but I’m nothing if not a rebel – I determined to stay up at least until totality. I got ready for bed and fended off sleep with an Agatha Christie until after 11. It was only as I was watching the last sliver of moon enter Earth’s shadow that I thought, why not try and photograph it? When I’d first got home, this was the photo I took on my iphone:
Underwhelming would be a generous description although you can probably tell it’s asymmetric. During totality I remembered the binoculars in my bedside table, so I tried taking a photo through that. Awkward, to say the least. There was a lot of swearing. Some early misfires include these:
Not sure what was going on there but there’s a bit of flesh in that second one. Just my hand, I think. Finally, however, I managed to see the moon through the iphone camera, and started taking pictures. Lots. They got better once I figured out how to turn off the flash, but I didn’t work out how to turn off the very clever low light setting that leaves the shutter open (or whatever the digital equivalent is) for several seconds. Fine if you have very steady hands but not when you’re trying to balance binoculars in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I’ve got a whole series that look like this:
A bit irritating. All I wanted was something that looked like this:
Which coincidentally was exactly what I could see with my own eyes. Why are cameras so useless?
In the end though, relooking at my pictures this morning, I’ve decided that I like this one. You could almost believe that it was deliberate. It might even be art.
