Lunar Eclipse 2025
On 07 September 2025 a total Lunar Eclipse was visible in large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. From Europe only part of the total eclipse cycle could be observed. From my location, the moon would rise just after 20:00 already fully eclipsed. At the end of the totality, at 20:53, the moon had only reached an altitude of 6°. So not the greatest of conditions.
Visibility of the eclipse with most of Europe able to witness the second half.
From the observation location, the moon would only rise just after 20:00h and by 22:00h also the partial eclipse had ended, with the moon only at 15° altitude.
We observed the lunar eclipse with several members from our local astronomy society. And while weather forecasts were moderately optimistic, clouds low at the horizon pretty much blocked the full period of totality. But as the moon rose and the evening progressed, the clouds slowly disappeared and we could still observe the tail-end of the eclipse.
Photographs were captured with a regular photo camera on a stationary tripod. The focal length of the objective was 500mm, which on this medium format camera has a full frame equivalent of 400mm. At this focal length it was important to keep exposures under 1s to avoid any trailing due to earth rotation. For this f/5.6 lens, ISO was set at 800, to give a longest exposure of 0.5s. As the eclipse progressed, this exposure time was manually adjusted to shorter periods.
Processing was done using Capture One and consisted mainly of some black point adjustments, mild sharpening and noise reduction and some selective highlight recovery. A composite image was created by selecting three of the best frames and combining them in Affinity Designer 2.
Just after the sun had set, the eclipsed moon rose above the horizon. As the totality had passed, clouds slowly started to disappear, allowing photographing the second half of the eclipse.