September 7 Partial Lunar Eclipse

September 8, 2006 · Posted in Mike's Blog 

A lunar eclipse is something that is not passed-up by weirdos like me. Ok, I’m not really a weirdo but many people call me so because I love going out at night upto early dawn just to look up the sky and take a look at the stars, the moon, the planets, comets, and meteors.

As anyone who knows me would expect, I stayed up and fought of the powers of sleepiness just to observe the September 7 partial lunar eclipse together with my wife.  Eclipse officially starts at 4:42pm 0GMT so that would be 1:42am here in the Philippines since we are at +8GMT.  We started our vigil at about 1:40 in the morning (Philippine time) though I knew nothing easily noticeable would be visible at this point.

I started seeing the penumbral shadow about 25 minutes later.  The umbral phase began at 2:05am and after 5 minutes, the portion of the moon that the Earth’s shadow first touched began to look a bit flat.  I told me wife to take a look and she noticed it.

We observed it and enjoyed it then my Vhi, my 5-year old daughter, woke up to pee.  I called her and told her to take a look.  She was still sleepy but she did take a look and even peeked through the binoculars.  I’m not sure if she would remember what she saw when she wakes up.  10 minutes after, I tried waking up Kei but she was to sleepy to even try to open her eyes.

Me and my wife decided to quit the session at about 2:45am though the maximum eclipse will still be at 2:51am.  Not that much of a difference anyway.

Guess what I did next?  I posted this entry of course.  Tomorrow, I will try to ask my friends at the Astronomical League of the Philippines to email me some of the photos that they took so I can post them here.

I enjoyed the night and I enjoyed the event - that’s for sure.



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