Saturday night fun photographing the eclipse.

One of the first pics I got after I ran up to grab my camera was this one. I was using a 18-55 lens and soon mounted my zoom which is 100 to 300 to take the majority of the rest of these pictures.After I had put on my 100 to 300 mm lens this is a pic I got of the eclipse almost complete.

It was interesting to watch how fast the moon moved over the two plus hours that I was tracking it and taking pictures and watch the stars that acted as escorts as it moved through the night sky.

Where did the moon go? All I see is a few stars!

Everything is okay as the moon is back again to illuminate our night sky for another day or night rather.

In the end I put my smaller lens on again and got one last pic from afar of the moon post eclipse.

What a surprise when you have no idea that there is going to be an eclipse.* That was the feeling last night when the moon came over the hill on the other side of the river and I soon realized a chunk of it was missing. Particularly strange as I thought it was supposed to be a full moon. It didn’t dawn on me right away what I was witnessing and I talked briefly with two people about the “strange moon” before a third said it must be an eclipse. We were so shocked as the calendar had shown that it was supposed to be a full moon and we had been watching the moon get fuller each night at dinner so when it came up and looked like the cookie monster had started to eat it we were rather speechless.

As soon we realized what was happening I grabbed the dinner that I had been preparing and got back to my room ASAP to grab my camera and tripod and spend the next few hours tying to photograph this not-so-daily phenomenon. In fact the last eclipse I remember really paying attention to was in Mozambique in 2002 when I saw it from Chibuto (near Chókwè) in Gaza province with friends and a fellow teacher who drove us to witness the solar eclipse. As follows are some of the over 60 pictures I took some in vain and some with decent results but I soon realized that my experience photographing eclipses, newness of using my digital SLR and quality of my equipment was no match for this celestial oddity.

*Having not watched TV (what a relief) or listened to the radio or read the (printed) newspaper in over a month it is hard to know what is going on in the world. I am not totally cut off having our satellite internet connection but it is slow and intermittent at best. But I still can’t complain. So this brings us to why the eclipse on Saturday was such a surprise.