Okay, some of y’all are gonna be mad.  Last week I promised fall color pictures for this week, and these are clearly NOT fall color pictures.  At least not in the sense of there being trees with orange leaves in it.  It is, however, a color image, and it was taken in fall – so maybe it IS a fall color image after all!  🙂  In all seriousness, when I made that proclamation last week, I wasn’t even thinking about there being a lunar eclipse this week, and it hadn’t even occurred to me yet to try to capture the blood moon over Neyland Stadium.  And I mean, how could I not post these images?  Especially since they were *actually* taken this week, this week’s Picture of the Week is truly a picture from this week!

Anyway, let’s talk about these images.  Way back in 2015, I got what I (still) believe to be my best eclipsed moon image.  Holly and I happened to be in Szczecin, Poland when the eclipse happened, and I got up and wondered around the city in the early morning hours to shoot it.  Since then, I’ve shot the blood moon a few other times, but haven’t really come away with much to get excited about.  The key challenge is that the moon occupies such a small portion of the sky, you really have to shoot it with a long lens to get something compelling, which means any other object you want to shoot it with will need to be a good distance away.  With this particular one, it was going to be eclipsed as it was setting, almost due west, which was very helpful.  I basically went through my mind all the sunset spots I have gone to, and that’s when it hit me – Neyland Stadium!  Here in East Tennessee, you basically can’t go wrong with Neyland Stadium, so here it is!  The image above was shot at 105mm, while the image below is at 300mm.  Because of the brightness differential of the eclipsed moon and the bright stadium lights, I did have to do some exposure blending to get the moon to show up as it appears in these images, but these are not composites. 

Alright now then, I PROMISE, next week will be fall colors.  Like actual fall colors.  I have also decided that I’m not holding back this year.  I’ll be sharing a good amount of images each week, so hopefully that will make up for the pump fake this week!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson