For the lunar eclipses in 2014 and 2015 I staked out locations in the Indian Peaks and at the overlook south of Boulder en route to Golden. On both occasions I shot wide angle through the eclipse, ending up with both time lapse footage and a composite image. Those efforts worked out pretty well. For the January 2018 edition I decided to try something different. The moon was going to set over the mountains while still in total eclipse, minutes before dawn. A long telephoto shot from the Lost Gulch Overlook on Flagstaff Mountain looked like it had potential.

My plan, it turned out, was not entirely original. Leaving home at 6am, a line of vehicles snaked up the hairpin bends to the overlook, where cars were parked for a hundred yards along the road! Maybe 50 people were out in the pre-dawn gloom, a fair number of whom sported hefty tripods and serious glass. Of the guest of honor, alas, there was no sign. A bank of low cloud in Boulder Canyon was potentially a scenic addition, but higher clouds completely blocked any view of the moon toward the western horizon. Sunrise didn’t happen either.

In lieu of the eclipse I shot a handful of frames of the peaks peeking through breaks in the clouds, along with some images of the view east to the plains with some low angle light below the clouds.

Peaks from the Lost Gulch Overlook

US 36 heading into Boulder