Past Friday we were able to watch a lunar eclipse pairing with a so called blood moon. The lunar eclipse was at its peak at around 2030 UTC. By then the moon was lighted by red light in the earths shadow giving it a blood red appearence.

I went out to a local field giving me a grat view of the moon only located about 20° above the horizon. I put up my tripod and equipped my Lumix GH5 with my Leica 100-400mm tele lens. In order to get the best outcome I put my camera into manual mode. I set my apperture to f8.0 and ISO to 200. With my remote I controlled shutterspeed between 2-8 seconds. The most tricky part was getting the moon into focus. Autofocus is of no use in the darkness and trying to focus on an object being an infinity away compared to daily motives is challenging. Being all set up I was able to catch the moon right in its red phase.

I was working around for hours. At least thats what it felt like. In reality it was only minutes before the red started to slowly fade and being replaced by actual light while the moon was leaving the earths shadow. One of the best parts to this lunar eclipse was that Mars was also visible, just below the moon slightly above the horizon. As far as I can remember it has been years since Ilast saw the red planet with my naked eye.

A lunar eclipse like this will not repeat itself for the next 105,000 years. At least that's what we are told. However this does not mean that it was the last lunar eclipse we will be able to catch. However, if you missed this one and do not want to wait forr thounds of years in order to watch it again, there was a livestream on youTube you can find here in order to watch it again. It is over 4 hours n length so you might want to skip ahead.

With the moon gaining more and more brightness I started focussing on different photography. This was a clear night with not a single cloud up in the sky, which is rather rare for our area. So I changed my lense to my Leica 25mm and redirected my camera up into the sky. Playing around with exposure time I was getting really nice images. Since there were some trees and a lightmast on my backside I changed direction and started setting up some nice motives to play around with. Eventually I pulled up the exposure time to 34 seconds. And before you head over to the album with a selection of pictures I took that night I want to leave you with this last stunning image.