Lunar Eclipses Flower

Lunar Eclipses Flower

This unusual mosaic is composed of random phases of all 18 significant lunar eclipses over the past decade (total, partial, and penumbral ones), also captured from Cerro Tololo and Kitt Peak National Observatory, and including the century’s longest one in the center of the mosaic (captured from Rhodes, Greece). The sizes and positions of the full moons are normalized to the unit angular diameter of the Earth’s shadow given by NASA to show the circular shadow of Earth. The composite shows different shades in the Earth’s shadow depending on the position of the Moon in it. The blue edge caused by short-wave radiation penetrating the lunar surface through the ozone layer is also visible. For most of them, I used Canon 6D or Nikon Z6III, 1000mm, f10, 4-6s exposures from Vixen GP-2 mount.

Full credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Petr Horálek/Institute of Physics in Opava, Robert Sparks, Josef Kujal, John Melson/Dave Hash/Wikimedia

A decade of lunar eclipses. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Petr Horálek/Institute of Physics in Opava, Josef Kujal, Dave Hash/Wikimedia, Robert Sparks

More about images used in this mosaic

This table contains more infomration about used images in the mosaic. Most of the eclipses were captured by me. Around period of COVID-19, however, I was not able to travel for the eclipses, so I used images taken by my colleagues who agreed with participating in this project. The table also shows, how the diameters of the lunar discs were normalized according to the actual distance of the Moon as well as the angular sizes of the Earth shadow in the sky during the particular eclipses.