The partial lunar eclipse shined over central North Carolina late Thursday into early Friday morning, but the skies were not totally cooperating to give people the best view.
Some cloud cover lingered over the area, obscuring some people's view of the relatively rare celestial show.
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WRAL photojournalist Michael Joyner and I were not going to be discouraged by some clouds, though. We set out Thursday night to track down a good view of the eclipse.
A partial lunar eclipse is when the Sun and the Earth are almost perfectly aligned with a full moon. Once the Earth's shadow covers most of the moon, it gives it a distinct dark orange-red hue.
We started our endeavor around 11 p.m. in Raleigh. We had a perfect view of the moon. Earth's shadow was covering nearly half of it.
We quickly noticed the clouds started rolling in. I pulled up the Cloud Cover feature in the WRAL Weather App, and we noticed thick clouds were covering most of the Triangle. Areas to the east were clear.
We started driving east to Knightdale, but the clouds were faster than we were. We stopped in Wendell to get a look of the eclipse at its peak at 12:12 a.m. Unfortunately, thick clouds covered the moon, and we could only see a sliver shining through the clouds.
With more than an hour-and-a-half left of the event, we kept going east to get a better look. We stopped in Spring Hope and Rocky Mount, where we captured video of the Earth's shadow nearly covering the moon.
Thankfully, some areas dodged the scattered clouds during the peak and got wonderful views of the eclipse. Others weren't so lucky, but still captured interesting shots of the eclipse shining through the cloud cover:
The next lunar eclipse in our area will be in 2029.