Ever since man's first appearance on this planet, eclipses have been regarded as both mystical and devine with some
cultures, for example, associating a lunar eclipse with the imminent arrival of death, war and/or famine. Although the
distance of the moon and sun from earth vary dramatically (400,000 vs 150,000,000 km, respectively), the apparent size
of these two heavenly bodies is such that they give the impression during an eclipse, solar or lunar, to be virtually
identical (ie. about 30 arc-minutes in angular size). A total eclipse represents the unique occurrence in space and time
where the sun, moon and earth are perfectly alligned as three collinear points on the same orbital plane. When the
collinearity is not perfect but one of these three bodies is slightly higher or lower in the plane, we have a partial
eclipse. Of course, a solar eclipse occurs when the moon lies perfectly between the sun and the earth, thus eclipsing
the solar disk. In contrast, a lunar eclipse occurs when the earth lies between the sun and moon and, thus, the moon is
hidden by the earth's shadow.
Note: The image details below left are as of eclipse maximum.
(First contact) |
(First contact) |
(Start of Totality) |
Totality |
(End of Totality) |
(Full) |
(End) |
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Body: Moon Mass: 0.0123 x Earth Mean Eq Diameter: 0.2719 x Earth Distance: 361,363 km Sidereal Rev: 27d 07h 43m 11s Age: 14d 18h 17m Diameter: 33.36' Saros Cycle: 131 Magnitude:
Duration:
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Date: May 04-05, 2004 21:45:00 - 01:15:00 UT+3 Location: Athens, Greece Equipment: Celestron 14" SCT Losmandy G-11 GEM TeleVue Pronto Canon EOS 300d Exposures: 1/2000 - 4 sec ISO 1600 RAW Image Format 3072x2048 Image Size Manual Mode Software: Canon FileViewer V1.3.2 Photoshop V6 Processing: RAW to TIFF (16-bit) Conv Masks Layers Resampling (10%) JPG Compression |