Coyote Moon
Sunday, January 20, 2019 – Superior, Colorado
Tonight’s forecast called for a lunar eclipse, designated the “super blood wolf moon.” The night sky was clear, with a few clouds here and there. The moon rose bright and cheerful, to 50º or 60º above the prairie horizon. Slowly, as foretold by the sages and astronomers, the earth’s shadow arrived. It seeped across the moon like slow drips of black coffee, and turned its sky to rust.
Coyotes emerged from their dens and announced the darkness. Millions of mobile phones pointed at the sky, and sent the shadow to the cloud.
Here are the images I managed to capture (20:54, 21:06, 21:40):
Image note: the middle image is a stack of 8 shots, aligned and merged with Registax. This software attempts to find areas of focus across all the shots, then merges and sharpens them. The result can have much higher sharpness than a single image, but not always. For example, my attempts to stack the blood moon came out muddy and soft (as were the original images, for that matter). I ended up using single exposures for the first and last images above. For the last image, I used Lightroom to raise the exposure of the surrounding space by about 4 stops, to reveal a few dim stars.
