Lunar Eclipse

 I'm late. But I have a good excuse. The lunar eclipse was back on March 3rd, about two weeks ago. So what took me so long? I set my alarm for  2:45AM. Ideal viewing time for totality was predicted to be from 3am - 4am. I used an app on my phone to figure out where the moon would be located at 3am (luckily it would be high enough on the horizon that I could set up in the back yard and shoot over my roof). Then I set up my camera with telephoto lens (100mm - 400mm) on the tripod in the dining room, so when I stumbled out of bed at 2:45am, I could just carry it out to the back yard. 

At 2:50, exposing for the brightest part of the moon,  it looked like a crescent moon.

 

Slowly the redish moon became visible as the eclipse proceeded, with the bright white non-eclipsed area at the bottom. Even if you didn't look at the moon, you would know something was going on. The light looked different... perhaps more reddish from the moon, and darker? It was about this time the coyotes started yipping and howling. Very cool. Even the coyotes knew something was different!

 

Getting the right exposure was a challenge because the non-eclipsed area at the bottom was bright and overpowering. 

 

Near totality, but not quite.

 

 

About as close to totality as I could get.

  

I took this photo in May of 2022. A better example of totality, with no white light visible.

 

I tried to get tree branches in the photo, but they were quite dark and hard to see.

 

By now, it was almost 4am, and I was ready to go back to bed. I got up a few hours later and showed my wife and granddaughter some of the moon photos using the camera display. Later that morning I removed the memory card from the camera and pluged it in to the card reader connected to my laptop to do some editing, and this is where things got weird. MY MOON PHOTOS WERE GONE. I could see earlier photos from a previous outing on the memory card (so I knew the card reader was working), but no moon photos. I tried putting the memory card back in the camera: Still no moon photos. I tried plugging my card reader into my wife's laptop: Still no moon photos. How could they just disappear like this???

 

After doing a little research, it turns out there are a number of file recovery programs out there (which makes me think files must go missing from these memory cards on a regular basis). I tried running one, but no luck. A second and third try with different programs also was unsuccessful. I even called a computer repair store (figuring they do hard drive file recovery), but they wanted $200, with no guarantee that my moon photos would be recovered. Um, no thanks. I gave up. A week later, I purchased new SanDisk memory cards so as to avoid this happening again. Opening a new card, I notice an offer for "free download of RescuePro" file recovery software. On a whim, I downloaded and ran the program. Like magic, there they were!! All my moon photos were recovered. A happy ending to the story, and good justification for for my late lunar eclipse post!

 

Thanks for stopping by!

Linking with Skywatch Friday.