The Beaver Blood Moon 🌙 🦫, the last total lunar eclipse until 2025. (Timelapse link below)

A composite series of the Beaver Blood Moon from last week. An eclipse occurs when the sun moves behind the Earth, casting the Earth’s shadow on the surface of the moon. The red colour comes from light refracting through the Earth’s atmosphere and experiencing Rayleigh scattering.

This refraction and scattering is the cause of the bright red colour and also why sunrises and sunsets are colourful. You can think of the phenomenon as the sun casting infinite sunrises and sunsets onto the surface of the moon.

With this series, I tried to show the outline of the Earth’s shadow with the partially eclipsed moon to help visualize how eclipses occur. During this eclipse, the moon spent most of the time in totality (fully in the Earth’s shadow), so I tried to show how the last three moons are curved inwards from the partial eclipse and fully in the shadow. The last moon in the series was taken as the sun rose during the morning blue hour, which caused the purple/blue colour.

If you want to learn more about how I shot the eclipse, please check out my guide (https://wanderloots.com/how-to-photograph-the-lunar-eclipse/). If you would like to see the wide angle and telephoto timelapse of this eclipse shot over the skyline of Toronto, here is a link: https://youtu.be/lU6sKVJ24RI

I hope you like it and would love to hear your thoughts 🚀

Technique:

1. Capture an HDR timelapse of the eclipse (almost 2000 photos)
2. Select the best frames for the timelapse in Lightroom
3. Process using LRTimelapse and Lightroom, editing for colour, contrast, haze, sharpness, and deflicker
4. Import to Photoshop for aligning the images

EXIF: Each moon is a single shot at f11, ISO 100, with shutter speeds ranging from 1/500 to 30s exposure.

Equipment: Sony a7iii, Sony 100-400 mm, Sony 1.4x teleconverter Skywatcher Star Adventurer Pro star tracker 2i