Twelve Lunar Eclipses

Welcome to the extra day in the Gregorian Calendar's leap year 2008!
To celebrate, consider this grid of lunar eclipse pictures - starting
in leap year 1996 and ending with February's eclipse - with the date in
numerical year/month/day format beneath each image. Mostly based on
visibility from a site in Turkey, the 3x4 matrix includes 11 of the 13
total lunar eclipses during that period, and fills out the grid with the
partial lunar eclipse of September 2006. Still, as the pictures are at the
same scale, they illustrate a noticeable variation in the apparent size of
the eclipsed Moon caused by the real change in Earth-Moon distance around
the Moon's elliptical orbit. The total phases are also seen to differ in
color and darkness. Those effects are due to changes in cloud cover and dust
content in the atmosphere reddening and refracting sunlight into Earth's
shadow. Of course, the next chance to add a total lunar eclipse to this
grid will come at the very end of the decade.