Astronomer captures picture of lunar eclipse as never seen before

Few days ago the world witnessed the longest blood moon lunar eclipse of the century. Numerous pictures of the rare phenomenon were uploaded, however, one picture stood above all.

Australian amateur astronomer Tom Harradine, inspired by the occurrence, captured a picture of the lunar eclipse. However, his picture was different from the rest resulting in an astonishing image of the eclipse as never seen before.

The picture was shared by Harradine as he arranged several different photos taken during the lunar eclipse occurred on July 27. The result of the combination of the pictures revealed a spectacular full scale of the Earth’s shadow in space, as described by Live Science.

Longest lunar eclipse of the century is happening tomorrow

Moreover, during an eclipse, the moon doesn’t pass through the whole of the Earth’s shadow the way it appears in the picture, but Harradine wanted to create an image showing the darkest inner region of the shadow known as umbra, which wouldn’t have been possible.

Consequently, as per Gizmodo, Harradine combined the arranged photos, rotated them and used some camera tricks to focus on the shadow instead on the moon. Thus, Harradine’s composite image is a bit of illusion.

“One way, I thought, to get the full circle of the umbra from a single eclipse event is to artificially locate and rotate successive eclipse images so as the shadow boundary forms a circle,” he said. “The trick is to keep the curvature of the shadow matching up as precisely as possible. Which images to choose is up to artistic license and I chose a spiral effect, not only to show the umbra but to also show the progression of the eclipse as time went on.”