Total Lunar Eclipse -21 January 2019

Good evening, all.

I managed to stay awake for the Total Lunar Eclipse on Monday morning.
Due to my Crayford focuser being out for repair on my William Optics 158 mm apochromatic refractor, I thought I ought to set up a Celestron Ultima 80 that my wife Valerie won in a raffle a number of years ago at a Cosmos weekend. Its focal length is 480 mm.
In my back garden, I did not use anything more than 20X. My field of view was 2 degrees -which was very good for this so-called Supermoon.
The first opportunity I had to observe the Penumbral Shadow was at 3.20 UT.
Partial phase occurred at the correct time of 3.34 UT -right on time.
It was a strange total eclipse -in that our Moon was well above the Earth's central umbra.
The brilliantly bright crater Aristarchus was occulted at 3.50 UT.
Then at 4.15 UT, Plato was covered by the Earth's shadow.
At 4.30 UT, the Proclus crater greatly faded, and lastly Langrenus was covered before that at 4.28 UT.
There was terrible dew in the air as there was no wind. Sadly there is now extending dew cap on the small Celestron. So I had to repeatedly place the caps back on at either end when I was not observing.
The Moon looked very odd when totality arrived at 4.41 UT. The southern hemisphere was orange / red alright. But the northern half still remained bright or dark grey depending where one was looking.
During almost the entire evening, Castor and Pollux (the 2 brightest stars of Gemini) were easily visible pointing at Luna. But at 5 UT, whatever haze there was became increasingly more and more dense. And at 5.12 UT the totally eclipsed Moon was almost completely invisible.
My early morning venture was over. But I did greatly appreciate my 12th Total Lunar Eclipse.

Did anyone have any success?

Thank you for reading.
Comments was very welcome.

Kindest regards from Aubrey.

Thanks for the Review.

Hi,

Glad you saw the eclipse Aubrey.

Here in MA it cleared following a snow storm. Still -14 C and very windy!

At mid-totality the colours were subdued, tan mixed some dusky brick-red and white on the north rim. Danjon scale L=3 with the naked-eye. The Mare were easily visible.

Also did photography with the 106 mm refractor. Just uploaded one image to my website (so far).

Please see: www.variablestarnights.net

John

Got a very limited view of the eclipse around 5am through the cloud. From the many pictures on the social media, looks like other parts of Ireland did much better.

Apparently a meteorite impact was captured by a number of cameras at 4.41 UT, very close to totality. This one from David Brewer in Colorado (at the 7 o'c position) -

Good grief!
How rare is that?

Aubrey.