June 26 2010 Lunar Eclipse 11b 04_04_52am PDT_DSC2709

June 26 2010 Lunar Eclipse 11b 04_04_52am PDT_DSC2709, originally uploaded by VancouverDoug.

I've been a big astronomy fan for years but since moving to the core of Vancouver and being surrounded on three sides by thousands of points of city light astronomical events that I can see are few and far between.

In the wee hours of June 26 2010 however I got that old star-gazer feeling back as I shot short (1/200s) and long (2s) exposures of the first partial lunar eclipse of 2010. As the low clouds over the Strait of Georgia and the dawn twilight started to roll in I caught this view of the moon 20 minutes away from the peak of the eclipse.

And, as luck would have it 6 hours earlier I'd watched, for the first time, the International Space Station (ISS) track across Vancouver's sky.

A few years of astronomical beauty crammed into 6 hours. :)