Under a Blood Moon

“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.“ Galileo Galilei

The full power of the sun’s rays just starting to hit the moon again after a total lunar eclipse on the 20th Jan 2019. The blood moon colour you see during lunar eclipses results from some of the longer wavelength red tones passing though the sides of the earth’s atmosphere while the majority of the shorter wavelength blues are blocked out. This is due to Rayleigh scattering which is the elastic scattering of sunlight through the earth's atmosphere. The amount of scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength, so the longer wavelength warmer tones passes straight though the atmosphere without significant deflection, while the shorter blue wavelengths are scattered in all directions. This is the same phenomena that you see when looking across the long stretch of atmosphere directly into the sun at sunrise and sunset giving the sky its red/orange colour. The scattered blue tones absent at sunrise and sunset are what gives the sky its blue colour during the day.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about my background in photography you can read the interview @photofeed did with me here.

Robert Downie
Love Life, Love Photography

_{All images in this post were taken by and remain the Copyright of Robert Downie - http://www.robertdowniephotography.com}