RASC - St. John's Centre
Members Photos

Almost impossibly , in the midst of a week of rain and snow driven by winds gusting to over 120 km/h (!!) - actually causing damage to property, and power blackouts in St. John's - the clouds cleared for a few hours late on the evening of January 20/21 2000, offering a lovely view of the first total lunar eclipse of 2000. Earlier on the 20th I'd chatted on-air about the eclipse on CBC Radio One's "Radio Morning", during which we agreed that a miracle would have to occur before anyone was seeing this one in the province! Indeed, the clouds started to break at 8pm that night! At 12am I ran outside our apartment with an 810mm lens (135 f/2.8 with 2X and 3X teleconverters) on a tripod-mounted 1970's vintage Praktica body loaded with ISO800 Kodak MAX colour print film, and with a cable release exposed between 1/30th and 1 second for the bright phases, then between 1 and 6 seconds around totality. Because the tripod was static (in the lee of our apartment building for some wind-protection), the shorter exposures tended to be clearer. Enjoy.
 

1970's vintage Praktica body loaded with ISO800 Kodak MAX colour print film, and with a cable release exposed between 1/30th and 1 second for the bright phases, then between 1 and 6 seconds around totality

Totality-proper started neatly at 12:35am local time (as predicted). From St. John's, NF, the moon was very high in the southern sky, and appeared as a glowing drop of blood-red amber. The last image was recorded just before 1am, after which I turned in (I had to get up for work the following morning, afterall!) According to predictions, totality would last until 1:52am, after which the sequence of images above would essentially reverse itself mirror-image to the above.