I went out at 3am this morning to see the eclipse. This one was special – a “blood moon,” so called because of its deep red color. Someone explained to me that the red color comes from sunlight being refracted through the perimeter of the earth’s atmosphere (where the sun is rising or setting). The only problem: there was so little sunlight that I had to shoot at 1/6th of a second, even with the ISO cranked up to 12,800. That meant the earth’s rotation softened the image of the moon. The whole time I was watching the eclipse, I kept thinking of the famous scene from ET in which kids on bikes fly in front of the moon. I found myself wishing that a bird or a plane would fly through the frame. And just then (through the magic of Photoshop), a great white egret lumbered across the blood moon!
