Astronomy

Observing Log for

Session Details


Durham

54.767, -1.574

10m

Notes

Cloudy skies.

Equipment

Tags

Observations

Lunar Eclipse

Strangely the great movement of celestial objects above us is now starting to get on my nerves. This was the third lunar eclipse since I came to Durham over a year ago and in total I have seen about 20 minutes worth of the moon.

This time everything conspired to make it the worst eclipse ever. Firstly it didn't kick off until really late. The shadow should have started moving across at around 2:15am, with the peak of totality at 4:04am. There was a great turnout of people despite the time, but there was a light drizzle falling so we all trooped into the Physics conference room. People sat around talking, some tried to sleep, and others did their physics homework! We kept track of the weather via the BBC website, putting all our hopes on a break in the clouds that looked to be heading our way. Unfortunately there was far too much low level cloud (not picked up by the IR) which kept the moon completely obscured throughout the night. Even our usual plan B failed when we discovered that most of the planet was covered in cloud and that therefore we could not even find a decent webcast! We eventually gave up at around 3:30am, at which point we trooped back to bed, some of us getting up a mere 3 hours later to do Engineering labs.

Curse you sky *shakes fist*

The next total lunar eclipse is in 2007, so expect bad weather that year.

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