The last time a total Lunar eclipse took place on the 21 of December was 1648 years ago. In 2010 the event repeated, a total lunar eclipse was visible in most of the Americas during the summer or winter solstice depending on which hemisphere you live.
The 2010 Solstice Eclipse
From my location: Buenos Aires, Argentina the eclipse started at 3:27am in the morning with the moon setting, moonset was during the totality stage so we only saw half of the eclipse. Fortunately the other half is just symmetrical to the first part but in reverse order and as the moon approached the horizon an optical illusion made it seem bigger than what it really was. A giant red moon looming over the horizon, that’s something you have to see!
Totality
I took photos every 2 minutes with a Canon T2i (550D) and a Canon 400mm F5.6 lens, the 1.6x crop factor of the 550D combined with the 400mm lens gave me a field of view of 640mm. I decided not to use the 1.4x teleconverter as it would make my lens go from F5.6 to F8 and the totality phase of the eclipse would take a long exposure time resulting in a blurry photo due to the Moon movement. The moon moves quite fast in the sky, I had to chase it with my camera from shot to shot. A micrometric head like the Manfrotto 410 helps a lot in that task.
Before and After
During totality the moon is in the Earth’s shadow so it is not lit by the sun but from Earth’s own light, when the atmosphere is clear the moon turns very red, in years with volcanic eruptions the moon can turn brown chocolate or be completely black. During this eclipse the stratosphere was very clear resulting in a bright red moon during the totality phase.
Solstice Eclipse Starscape
It’s very difficult to take a photo of the stars with the moon included in the frame, the moon is so bright that gets totally overexposed producing flares glare and diminishing the stars. During the totality phase of the eclipse the moon was very dim allowing the capture of the moon against a background of stars in the same field of view.
You can check more photos at my site: http://www.luisargerich.com
