Lunar Eclipse Pictures

On the night of July 11, 2008, the fires in California were still burning and filling the air with a thick haze. While a layer of smoke in our atmosphere is terrible for viewing pretty much everything astronomers love to look at, it's great for creating intricate colors on the moon.

The Stanford Astronomical Society viewed the moon and its dramatic colors on the 16" scope at the student observatory. We took 650 ms exposures through red, green, and blue filters with a 3072x2048 Finger Lakes sensor with 9 micron pixels. No processing of the images was done and no adjustments were made on the color balance or stretch, These are essentially true color images, representing what we saw with our naked eye.

The full resolution images can be downloaded by right-clicking on one and saving it.

Time of Night: 9:54-9:57 p.mfi

Time of Night: 10:53-10:56 p.m

Time of Night: 11:10-11:13 p.m