Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse

I don’t know how they come up with these names, but it was every bit of epic as it sounds. I had been looking forward to this for weeks and checking the weather for Sunday night obsessively. We got our first ‘Arctic Blast’ of the year over the weekend (even a bit of snow!), so I was just hoping most of the clouds would blow through in time.

The total duration of the event was just over 5 hours, kicking off around 8:30pm when the penumbral eclipse began. The penumbra is the outermost part of the Earth’s shadow. This type of eclipse is far more common than partial and total eclipses.

You can see here that the penumbral eclipse had already began when I shot my first image. The shadow was already falling on the left side, but it hadn’t yet ‘taken a bite out’ of the moon.

I made the trek up to the top of my parking garage around 9pm, about half an hour before the partial eclipse was set to begin. I wanted to give myself some time to get my telescope set up and get my camera settings in order. If you haven’t read my post detailing my gear for shots like this, be sure to check it out. I invited a friend over to partake in the experience. Thankfully, he came bearing hot chocolate because it was THIRTY DEGREES. The real show kicked off around 9:30pm as the partial eclipse began, which eventually led to a total eclipse.

Over the next few hours, I snapped photos intermittently so I could get a nice sequence of shots. I had to adjust my camera settings as I went, as the amount of light the moon was producing was dimming over time. The eclipse finally reached its ‘total’ phase around 10:45pm. It finally had that amazing red-orange glow from which it gets its name.

I finally called it quits around 11:30pm when my hands were frozen solid. It was awesome to experience and was worth every second. I’m already looking forward to the next big lunar eclipse in 2021!