July 2018 - Longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century

The July lunar eclipse was the longest for the 21st century because the moon passed very close to the centre of the Earth's shadow. I imaged this eclipse with my camera mounted with a 500 ml lens on a telescope mount and with another camera with a 300 mm lens on a tripod.

The moon was very dark during the eclipse. The sequence above highlights too changes to the appearance of the Moon leading up to the mid stages of the eclipse. I was unable to image the whole eclipse because the Moon set before it was completed.

26 May 2021 - A very brief eclipse

In contrast, this eclipse unlike the July 2018 event was very brief. The moon passed within 34km of the edge of the Earth's shadow and always appeared bright on one side, It was only totally covered by the umbra for about 17 minutes. thus exceeding the camera's dynamic range for a single shot. This highlighted by the close up shot (below) which shows the bright side and the brownish appearance of the eclipsed moon. I have not attempted to do a HDR stack of this image as I feel it my look unnatural

The May 2012 event did provide n awesome opportunity to image the moon in the constellation scorpius which is situated in the sky close to where the Milky Way core is viewed in Sagittarius. The image below was taken by exposing 8 shots for the moon at ISO 200 at f5.6 on the Sigma 35 mm lens at 0.8 of a second and combining it with 4 background star shots shot at ISO 2000 at f2 for 5 seconds on the sam lens. The camera was not moved on the tripod during the imaging

The size of the moon corresponds to its real size as viewed against the background stars by the naked eye as imaged at the same time.