Here’s my observation photo of the penumbral lunar eclipse last night, March 23, 2016. My observation took place here in Cavite, the initial phase started at around 5:37 PM, but my observation started at around 6:38pm already because the moon rising very low and I don’t have a view of its moon rise on the horizon, the highest moon rise occurred in our area at around 6:30-ish. There we saw the yellowish colored moon rising up. I was with my son during the observation and he got amazed with the big size of a yellowish-brownish colored moon.
During our observation, we waited for the penumbral or side shadow of the Earth to cover the surface of the moon, but then its hard to determine if we already at the penumbral lunar eclipse or we just missed or we fail to observe it.
I did some research and view others observation photos and we got the same result, many people ask if that’s it and why is it that the moon never changed its color – like a darker moon because of the lunar eclipse phase. ( the penumbral phase will just give a darker filter and not totally black shadow like the umbra shadow of the Earth, which is the middle opaque shadow)
Then when I gather up my lunar eclipse photos, then I noticed that the moon did change its brightness, From my photo above, you’ll see the brownish moon that I took at around 6:38pm, then the moon changed its brightness level when it reached the highest part of the sky at 6:45pm, then at around 6:56pm, the middle and 3rd photo, showed a darken surface of the moon.
Photo 4 is on full penumbral lunar eclipse, I took that photo around its peak time at 7:45pm. Then at around 9pm, the moon started to bright up again and the shadow of the Earth is no longer visible.
Its really hard to view it using a telescope or camera with telescopic lens, because the full moon is so bright and the dark filter color is hard to trace with the naked eye.
I only noticed it when I compared a series of photos taken every 30 minutes.
Awesome!!!
Here are a bigger version of the penumbral lunar eclipse of March 23, 2016
Taken by a Nikon D5300 with 55-200mm Nikkor lens, mounted on a cheapo CDRKing gorillapod
