~ Total Lunar Eclipse in Leo (The Lion) ~

We are cruising up the Queensland coastline on board the Crown Princess and even though it started out cloudy for the lunar eclipse the clouds parted just before totality and Wow!  

​The fully eclipsed Moon looked just awesome on the top deck of the ship.  The ship was moving quite a lot so I had to take many images and Yay!

​I managed to get a few that were in focus, I’ve also included an image of what most of my pictures  looked like.

​But it’s not easy taking astronomy images on board a moving ship….but where  there’s  a will, there is always a way :-)
 
We have just been cruising up and down the Queensland coast near the Great Barrier Reef for the last couple of days trying to dodge a cyclone which has now just crossed the coast near Cairns; the Captain has done a fantastic job of keeping us all safe on board the ship.
​
My lunar images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and Tamron 28-400mm lens attached to a tripod; the wide field was taken with a Canon G7x camera on the top deck of Crown Princess.

~ Total Lunar Eclipse in Leo (The Lion) on Crown Princess Cruise Ship on 3rd March 2026 ~

​Woohoo!
After all the shocking weather with Cyclone Alfred we managed to have a beautiful clear evening for the partial lunar eclipse here on the Gold Coast in QLD Australia on the evening of the 14th March 2025.
 
I’ve viewed many lunar eclipses but this is the first time I’ve seen one in eclipse as it rises in the eastern sky, I wasn’t sure where it was going to come up and I got so excited when I saw it above the rooftops of the houses :-D
 
I couldn’t use my telescope because the eclipsed Moon was so low in the sky, so I used my trustee Canon 70D with Tamron 18-400mm lens with 2x teleconverter making a focal length of 1280mm.
​Camera setup was on a static camera tripod.
 
Ten to fifteen images were captured of each phase then stacked in RegiStak6 and processed in PS.

We had a lovely clear night for this special event, it was quite interesting to see the soft shadow on the Moon as it entered into the Earths penumbra, the outer limb stayed very bright.

The eclipse began at 1.14am, with maximum at 3.22am and ending at 5.31am and visually you could not see much difference in the light on the surface of the Moon until at maximum.

I have taken an image at each phase of the eclipse for the photo montage, I used a Canon 70D camera and a Canon 100-400mm lens with a 2x tele converter attached,  making a focal length of 1280mm. Multiple images were captured and stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS.

This is my second eclipse in two weeks as I experienced the incredible Total Solar Eclipse on board the P&O Pacific Explorer on the 20th April at Exmouth in Western Australia….Wow, that was so amazing :-)

​~ Totality was from 8.16pm to 9.42pm ~
 
I’ve made up a photomontage of the lunar images that I took of the Total Eclipse of Moon on the evening of the 8th November 2022.
 
It was very cloudy to begin with so missed some of the beginning, the first image taken was when the Moon went into the Umbral at 7.11pm, this had to be a very quick shot as cloud came over the sky a few minutes after.
 
The next time it had cleared, was half way through the eclipse at 7.46pm. It looked like we were not going to see totality but by magic the sky started to clear and there was the eclipsed Moon in all its glory among the faint stars of Aries (The Ram).
 
It looked ever so pretty and the colour was just gorgeous, because I only had my camera and lens on a tripod I could only take a couple of shots at a time as the movement of the heavens is quite noticeable at high magnification.
 
I used a Canon 70D camera and Tamron 18-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter making a focal length of 1280mm. Because the eclipse was quite bright I only had to use a 1 second exposure with ISO 2000 to capture a pretty picture.
 
Please see below the single image with all the setting times that I used, it was so lucky that the sky cleared in time to see this beautiful wonder of the night sky :-)

1st image taken at 7.11pm (AEST) Umbral Eclipse has begun.
​Five images captured with exposure time of 1/250th second and ISO 160, stacked in RegiStax6.

2nd Image taken midway into eclipse at 7.46pm with exposure time of 1/250th second and ISO 200.
Five images captured and stacked in RegiStax6.

3rd Image taken at Totality at 9.06pm with planet Uranus only 1.5 degrees away, exposure time of 1 second and ISO 2000, five images were captured and stacked in RegiStax6, processed in PS CS4.

4th images taken at 10pm with the Moon moving out of the Earths shadow and sunlight returning on NW limb at 10pm with exposure time of 2 seconds and ISO 500.
​You can still see the gorgeous orange red colour on the surface with this longer exposure.

 5th Image was taken at 10.07 pm that showed a lot of the Moon still in the Earths shadow, with exposure time of 1/30th second and ISO 400.
 
At 10.10pm cloud came over the whole sky and that was the end of seeing more of the Eclipse
​that ended at 11.58pm.

~ Lunar Eclipse with Uranus on the ecliptic ~

​​We had very cloudy skies right up to the time of totality and then the sky cleared for a stunning view of the Total Eclipse of the Moon; this was a particularly pretty eclipse because of the field of stars surrounding the deep red Moon with the bluish planet Uranus only 1.5 degrees away.
 
Images were taken with just a Canon 70D camera and Tamron18-400mm lens and 2x teleconverter, making a focal length of 1280mm on a static camera tripod.

Five images were captured with 1-second exposures, ISO 2000 and stacked in Registax6 processed in PS.