Milky Way during a Lunar Eclipse
Mount Sneffels Wilderness, Colorado, 2015
I'm lucky enough to have been able to photograph the entire sequence of two of the four lunar eclipses in the 2014/2015 tetrad, a phenomenon that won't occur again until 2032/2033. During the first of those two sequences, October 2014 at the Great Salt Lake, I was struck by the contrast between the darkness of a lunar eclipse's totality and the brightness before and after. I wanted to make a single image that captured, at least for me, that contrast, and this is it. (And I've wanted for a while to photograph the Milky Way from the summit of Mt. Sneffels, my favorite mountain.) While one camera clicked away every five minutes to capture the eclipse sequence I posted earlier, I used a second camera to make other photos. In this composite, I photographed the stars during the eclipse's totality, when the stars were brightest, and I photographed the landscape, a view looking toward Telluride, after the eclipse had ended. The green airglow was a wonderful, unexpected bonus. Photo © copyright by Greg Owens.