027/366: #SuperBloodMoon

Really, was there any question at all what the subject of today's photo would be? I mean, I'm a geek, I have a fancy camera-- of course I was taking pictures of the lunar eclipse. But more importantly, I was sharing it with SteelyKid:

SteelyKid looking at the eclipse through her telescope.

That's SteelyKid looking through her telescope at the early stages of the eclipse. The light is from the lamp in our front yard, which would be no good at all for trying to see anything actually faint, but isn't really an issue when you're looking at the full moon.

The telescope-- a Celestron FirstScope, in case you missed her birthday-- worked really nicely. I have it set up on a platform the department machinist made for me, that screws onto a camera tripod, which also worked really well. We mostly used the widest-field eyepiece that came with it, because we could see the whole disk of the moon that way, and occasionally dropped in one of the bigger magnifications to look at details.

I also had a bigger tripod set up with my camera on it, to take some shots with the telephoto lens. Here are a couple of the better ones:

A little more than halfway to totality.

Turn around, bright eyes.

SteelyKid's review of the "Super Blood Moon": "Huh. I like the color. I was expecting something brighter, but that's a nice color."

This evening was a ton of fun, because SteelyKid was super pumped up. Largely because this let her be up and outside an hour and a half after she's usually in bed asleep; tomorrow morning will be, um, interesting. But it was totally worth it.