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Last updated February 27, 2018
Edmonton was extremely lucky with incoming clouds dissolving as they approached https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq-9ReC1oGo . I decided to head east to improve my chances. As a result, my horizon was different than what is seen farther down. Here are links to two movies I made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdENF3NmWsw "Drifting Across the Umbra" : time lapse tracking the eclipsed Moon against stationary stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izeRj9ercM4 "From Umbra to Lux": a wide-angle time-lapse from the end of totality to moonset.
Original page below:
Times for other regions, consult skynews.ca, as well as how-to-image. Also check out Gary Boyle's Sky: https://www.rasc.ca/news/sky-month-january-2018
ALERT! Wednesday MORNING, not evening
Edmonton area local circumstances:
Edmonton Circumstances for the Wednesday January 31, 2018 Total Lunar Eclipse
Times are MST
Alt Az
u1: 4:48:28 partial begin 29.9 257.0
U2: 5:51:49 totality begin 20.7 269.8 Sun Alt -22 (very dark)
U3: 7:07:53 totality end 9.8 284.0 Sun Alt -10.8
U4: 8:11:14 partial end 1.5 295.8 Sun alt -2.1 (bright!)
Sunrise 8:20
set:8:26 set 298.8
The Moon is a *lot* smaller than you might think, and covers such a large swath of sky in a couple of hours that you need a wide enough lens to capture some foreground, which makes the Moon look even smaller. Totality ends at Alt 9.8 Az 284, *very* similar to this image of a crescent Moon I shot from Strathearn Crescent (east portion) on 2015 April 20, Alt 9.6 Az 283.7:
Note how small the Moon's disk is! Anything below 2.5 degrees is lost behind the buildings. This is shot with a lens at 40mm. So if you want to catch the sequence from the start of totality, you'll need about half the focal length, making the Moon twice as small. Another decent place is Cloverdale Hill, above the Muttart.
Here is a composite from September 27, 2015, shot at 27mm; you can barely see detail on the Moon's face. Totality began 9 degrees up (second image from the left).
It's impossible to get a cityscape and a large Moon, but you can do a partial building from relatively nearby, like the following:
Epcor, being 140m high, to make it 10deg in altitude, you need to be about 800m away Az 104. In Riverdale. Now Riverdale is down in the valley, so you can expect to see the eclipsed Moon crest the building tops when it is higher up, which means the Moon will be farther west, so you'll need to be more north, perhaps the parking lot on the east side of the Rowland Road bridge. Watch out for power lines in the line of sight! Ah, but then you are farther away, making the tops of the buildings lower., only 7 degrees. Sigh.
You're just not going to get anything like this fake composite:
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