Total Lunar Eclipse
Last night was a total lunar eclipse; not quite as pretty and exciting as a solar eclipse, but still nice to see. Totality was from about 9:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.here, so after my evening class I met up with one of my friends and we went up to the observatory on top of the physics building. i also called my parents, so they came and brought my brother.
It was fun to see the eclipse through a real telescope; the observatory staff had adjusted it so that the moon filled the entire field of view. After the eclipse went out of totality (and we had waited 20 minutes for everyone there to finish seeing it) the staff pointed the telescope over to Saturn. Since Saturn was in the sky quite near the moon and there had just been an eclipse, simple geometry meant that it would be brilliantly lit, which it was. It made for a nice, if unusual view: Saturns's color wasn't very apparent, but even though the rings were nearly edge on to the Earth the shape was quite sharply defined.
The night was quite cold, and I really wasn't warm enough for hours afterward, but it was a great experience that I would have hated to have missed out on.