Another Look At The Lunar Eclipse

After the lunar eclipse I saw a few different people posting photo-collages to show off the curvature of the Earth's shadow. All the pictures online are incredibly cool, and I wish there was an original that I could cite or reference. I certainly wouldn't have come up with this idea on my own.

The idea is that each picture of the moon during the eclipse has a curved shadow across it, and if we combine all those shadow curves into one image it creates a circle. That resulting circle is a true size representation of the Earth's shadow at the distance of the Moon. Before doing this I had no idea how large the Earth's shadow is, but it makes sense seeing as the Moon was totally eclipsed for about an hour.