Eclipse

I'm almost there!
One last thing to take care of before the end of the year and I'm home free!
One.
More.
Thing.
First, there was this lunar thingy last night.
Full moon, Earth's shadow, red stuff, etc.
All images taken with my Nikon D7100 and Nikkor 70-200 VRII at f2.8:

Forget about totality.
Clouds all over the place!
Finally I got into the car and drove to the park.
Couldn't even get the camera to focus and I had to guesstimate!
Finally some breaks in the puffiness:

There was also some high cloud cover so resolution was pretty much nonexistent.
I did get some nice shots coming out of totality.
The wind was a blowing too and I could hear the vibration reduction of the lens working all night.
This is while the camera was on  a tripod!

Thank goodness for technology or these images would be really crappy!
The moon was actually really dark, you could hardly see it at times but I was using a really slow shutter to bring it in.
After it started to get brighter, I started to speed the shutter up some.

Sort of a reverse diamond ring effect going on there.
It was pretty cool to see with the nekkid eyeball.
The last lunar eclipse I remember was way more cloudy and you couldn't really see anything.

I had planned to sort of stay for a while but it was wait and shoot with all the clouds and the old Earth was a taking it's time getting the hell out of the way.

So after about two hours, I packed it in and headed on back to the Flat Tire Command Center (FTCC).
All this celestial stuff has got me thinking about getting another telescope.
Then you gotta get the adapters and eye pieces and Barlows and filters and equatorial mounts and well, you know the drill.
On the other hand, astrophotography is sort of why I got all interested in photography anyways.
Wait.
Lemme just enjoy taking pictures for a while, you know, before I go off the deep end.
Huh?
Oh yeah.
I've already gone off the deep end.