Monthly Archives: January 2019

Blood Moon, Lunar Eclipse (total), January 20-21, 2019

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I have never seen a blood moon before. So I was concerned about missing any important moment. I saw the big orange color moon with beautiful sunset and took some photos of the moon around 6:15pm, Sunday, January 20, 2019

Partial Eclipse started 10:33pm. This is a photo taken at 11:10pm.  It was interesting to see some blue and purple color around the edge of the moon.  It was amazing, and  it was not hard to take photos at this time because the moon was bright and quite large.

Total Eclipse started at 11:41 pm.  I did not take any photo until 11:50 pm when it started to turn red at low corner and slowly spread up.  Wow, it was beautiful. By the way, this  was a cold night by Florida standards as It was 46 degree F.  Now with the moon straight  up, a small, and dark red glow was visible. This photo was taken at 12:39 am, Monday.  Good thing I had sleeping cart along with a blankets and pillow on the back lawn or it would have even more difficult to capture this lifetime event! 

This Photo was taken at 12:55am.  Total Eclipse was finished.  I was done.

Based on meteorologist, the partial Eclipse was suppose to begin at 10:33pm and end at 1:50 am, Monday, Jan. 21. Total Eclipse starts at 11:41pm and ends at 12:43 am, Monday, Jan. 2019 https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/usa/tampa

Next chance to see this type of event will be 2021 AD.  I may not be around at that point in time to capture the lifetime event.

Panama Canal New Lock

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Panama Canal is one of the seven wonders of the world. We went through the old canal locks, Gatun Lock with Island Princess cruise ship in 2012. We were amazed. Now, we re-visited the canal and went through new locks, Agua Clara Locks with the larger ship, Caribbean Princess which is the first major cruise line operating partial transits of the canal at Atlantic entrance in 2017. Caribbean Princess’ beam is 118 feet that is 12 feet wider than maximum allowed for the old canal locks.

The Agua Clara locks have three chambers. Each chamber is 180 feet wide, 1400 feet long, and 60 feet deep. The chambers are designed to rise the ships from sea level to the level of Gatun Lake and the opposite way going toward the Atlantic. It took approximately 40 minutes for the ship to go through each chamber, a total time is two hour from enter the locks to exit the locks.

We got up 4:00 am to get the best location at front of the ship at deck 15 to take photos. It was still dark. When the ship approached the locks around 5:00 am, we took photos of both locks, Agua Clara Locks (new locks) on the port side and Gatun Locks (old locks) on the starboard side. Wow. It was exciting. Panama charged the Caribbean Princess approximately $47,000 just to go through the locks.