Destination:Forever Ranch and Gardens founder and creator Jan Emming shares his experiences with living on a remote, off-grid 40 acre parcel of scenically gorgeous and biologically diverse desert land in northwestern Arizona. Jan shares his insights into matters of sustainability, green living, world botanical explorations, and more. Join him to learn what this unique process is like, and offer your experiences as well.
Lunar Eclipse Over My Garden, Tuesday November 8, 2022
The total lunar eclipse that occurred early in the morning of Tuesday, November 8, 2022 was mostly visible during the “blood red” phase of totality here in western Arizona. Usually nights are clear in the desert, but an approaching Pacific frontal system called the potential visibility into question. In fact, the crescent phases of the eclipse were indeed partially obscured by clouds, but the red totality phase which lasted between about 3 AM and 4:40 AM local time was blessedly clear. These photos I captured of my house and garden with the unearthly moon hovering in the sky were the result of this fortunate outcome.
One quick note on the photos: I am generally most interested in catching lunar eclipses in the wider context of the landscape and sky, and I didn’t really focus on getting pictures of the moon in close up detail. There are literally thousands of great “blood moon” close ups taken by capable photographers, whereas (hopefully) intriguing photos of unique foregrounds with a smaller moon sailing overhead are more to my liking these days.
This photo depicts the moon just after it fully entered totality, when there was no more brightly-lit white portions of the lunar surface. My largest tree aloe “Hercules” is the prominent plant in the foreground, now reaching about 12 feet/4 meters tall.I zoomed in a bit on Hercules to make the moon proportionally larger and to show the reddish-orange color it exhibits when passing through the earth’s shadow. This was a 30 second exposure and I lit Hercules with my headlamp for a few seconds to bring out the detail in the leaves.The same view of Hercules, only with red lighting for variance. I know, it’s weird, but this is art!I moved into position to capture this image of Hercules with the eclipsed moon to the lower right, and the constellation of Orion to the left. The Pleiades are the star cluster to the upper right just above Hercules and to the upper left of the moon.A vertical composition of the cosmic scene over my house at around 3:30 AM on Tuesday November 8, 2022. I cropped off some of the less interesting black sky before posting.The same view as in the prior photo more or less, just with a wider horizontal framing instead.I switched corners of the house to get yet another angle of view involving some different plants. (And one “plant” that isn’t actually organic.)Moving out into the “back yard”, which is what I loosely term the desert slope that reaches to the south behind my house, I’ve been focusing for this past few months on planting various items here. I purchased this 5 foot/1.5 meter tall boojum tree (Fouquieria columnaris) from a friend in Los Angeles back in May 2022, along with two others of similar size. The L.A. friend had in turn purchased the three trees I got, plus around 30 others, from a man in Desert Hot Springs, California, who had sown seeds he got from Baja California, Mexico way back in 1991, making these boojums roughly 30 years old at the time I obtained them.
The agave to the left is an unnamed species (maybe Agave palmeri?) I obtained at Home Depot a couple of years ago. The boojum has been there for roughly 6 months as of eclipse time on Nov 8, 2022, and the agave was literally plugged into the ground a few hours before I took this photo. The moon is still in totality here, but it is brightening as it prepares to shift out of earth’s shadow.Only about 30 minutes after I took the previous photo, the moon has partially moved out of the earth’s shadow, making it look like a crescent again. Meanwhile clouds associated with an incoming Pacific “atmospheric river” system have returned, creating the soft-focus, blurred appearance as they blow past on the wind in the time exposure. For posterity’s sake: The storm delivered me .65 inches (about 15 mm) of rain later that day on November 8, 2022, which also happened to be election day for the midterm of the Biden Administration. This same storm also brought heavy rain and snow to most of Oregon and California, hopefully helping to ease long-term drought a bit.This scene was taken at 5:15 AM, when the moon was coming out of the eclipse phase and had a crescent appearance again. I’ve already mentioned that the boojum tree was recently planted, in late May 2022. Meanwhile, the saguaro cactus about 4 feet/1.2 meters tall has been there for almost 3 years, and the 5-gallon sized agave to the left was literally planted just hours before. The buckhorn cholla cactus (Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa) behind the agave is wild and native and has been there for a minimum of 30 to 40 years by this point. The juniper trees (Juniperus californica) are easily 200 or more years old in the background. Someday this photo will be fun to look at as time moves on, and static photos themselves become “historic”.
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2 thoughts on “Lunar Eclipse Over My Garden, Tuesday November 8, 2022”
Love the pictures. Your becoming a photographic artist my friend.
Love the pictures. Your becoming a photographic artist my friend.
I agree with Stephenson; beautiful photos! Loved the last one most.