Bad Astronomy

A lighter shade of umbra

I love creative people. They do things that surprise us, and that’s one of many things that makes like worth living…

I’ve seen probably two dozen lunar eclipses. They’re pretty, but they’re slow. It takes a while to notice the shadow of the Earth slowly creeping across the lunar face. This makes it hard for me to get really excited about them. I enjoy them, of course, but it’s also hard to sustain a high level of excitement when you keep going back inside and outside every 15 minutes to watch the eclipse’s glacial progress.

But then I saw this image, and all was forgiven:

Man, that’s brilliant. I’ll never see another lunar eclipse the same way.

And that image is one of many at Laurent Laveder’s Photoastronomique site. Like Thierry Legault (as I previously blogged), he is a true artist, and a very clever one at that. Check out the rest of his eclipse images. He has a fantastic way to visualize the Earth’s shadow on the sky. His stuff is so cool!

I love creative people.

Hat tip to good ol’ APOD, and to Laurent for giving me permission to use his wonderful picture.