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.
September 24th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Wow! Yet another amazing pic. Thanks for sharing it. Although not completely natural, this is my pick of the lot
http://www.photoastronomique.net/photo_us.php?nom=060907_1898
September 25th, 2006 at 3:48 am
[...] “A lighter shade of umbra“, uma imagem curiosa aproveitando um eclipse, e um tipo de arte que gosto particularmente, muito mais cativante do ponto de vista artÃstico do que a chamada Space Art. No Bad Astronomy. [...]
September 25th, 2006 at 10:24 am
And I always thought it was caused by the Earth’s shadow! Something else I need to relearn from my school days!!!
September 25th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
And I always thought it was caused by the Earth’s shadow! Something else I need to relearn from my school days!!!
I’m guessing that BA is preparing (has already prepared?) an article debunking the Earth’s shadow falling on the moon and the rest of that nonsense.
October 12th, 2006 at 10:24 am
[...] Recently, the blogsphere has been murmuring about the artistic side of science. The Bad Astronomer made several posts along these very lines, as well as {mollishka’s title goes here} and me in my blog. I think all of them are worth checking out if you have the time. [...]
December 29th, 2006 at 2:33 am
[...] Bad Astronomy escribió sobre esta foto en septiembre del 2006. [...]
January 1st, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Does everybody realize that this photo has been modified? The moon cannot be in front of the clouds across the lower part of the screen. This makes the photo rather phony, I’m afraid, and not just a clever trick of photography.
January 5th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Hi Alan,
this photo hasn’t been modified, except contrast, luminosity, color balance and noise reduction. It is not a phony: the Moon seems to be in front of the clouds because it is so luminous that it masks the clouds light.
If I have done a phony, I would have made a better photo of the Moon (well exposed) and pasted it in the photo.
Have a look to my website http://pixheaven.net and you’ll see I’m not a cheater!
January 20th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Hi Laurent,
Thanks for explaining your photo. I can see that you did a lot of preparation to take it – upon looking at your website. Can you tell me why the upper and lower clouds across the Moon look so different. They seem to be equally thick, yet only the lower one isn’t visible…
Thanks