Lunar eclipse - a family affair

Things have been rather vacuous here, so I thought I'd regale a story I posted to the RASC Halifax mailing list way back on March 3rd just after the total lunar eclipse

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I haven't done any observing for many months, for a whole variety of reasons (some good, some not so good), so I was particularly excited about the lunar eclipse tonight. I watched the moon rise over the past few days and it turns out that when it was to hit totality, it would be just above the trees right off my front porch.

My daughter, who is only 22 months old, is completely fascinated by the moon. For several months now, whenever she sees the moon, she goes completely bananas. "Moon, daddy, moon! Oooooooo!" She stares up and points at it and oohs and ahhs. A budding astronomer, to be sure. My plan is executing perfectly *cackle*.

I really wanted her to see the eclipse, so I hoped and hoped for the past couple of days that the weather would hold out, and I believe that we were suitably rewarded.

As soon as it got dark, I grabbed my binoculars, camera, and tripod and got set up because I wanted to try to get some umbral pictures. Overall, the views were magnificent and I got a couple of really nice pictures of totality (unfortunately, I had the multi-focus setting wrong, so my umbral pictures are pretty fuzzy). But that certainly was NOT the highlight of the evening for me.

While I was waiting for totality, my wife comes out, with my daughter all bundled up, and we watch the eclipse together. My daughter was absolutely amazed at the moon. She definitely noticed that something was different about it, although we really couldn't explain it all that well. We watched and watched and I took zillions of pictures. It was wonderful.

Eventually I packed things up and we headed back home. We were facing west, so she immediately saw the big, bright "sparkly" shining over our house.
"Daddy, spark-y!"

"That's right, hon. That's VENUS. Can you say Venus?"

"Nee-us"

"That's right, sweetie!" She giggled.

All in all, an incredible evening and an amazing event. Oh yeah, the eclipse was pretty neat, too.