Total Lunar Eclipse - March 13-14, 2025

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Equipment: Takahashi TOA-150 apochromatic refractor on an iOptron CEM60ec mount, Nikon D810a DSLR

Exposure: 290+ individual frames captured through the night; 9 combined into the composite above

A composite showing the full progression of the March 13-14, 2025 total lunar eclipse, shot right from home in Grapevine, Texas.  No need to travel for this one — the whole event, start to finish, played out overhead on a clear March night.

The moon was tracked continuously through an intervalometer-driven sequence of 290+ exposures, from the first bite of the penumbra through totality and back out again.  Nine frames from that sequence, evenly spaced, make up the composite above — arranged in a single row radiating outward from totality at the center, with the exposure time climbing steeply toward the middle of the sequence as the moon dims from a fully-lit disk to a dim red ember and back again.

That jump in exposure time from one frame to the next is the whole story of a lunar eclipse.  During the partial phase, the sunlit crescent is still bright enough to expose in a fraction of a second.  But once the moon slides fully into Earth’s umbra, direct sunlight is blocked entirely — what little light reaches the lunar surface has been refracted and reddened by passing through Earth’s atmosphere, the same effect that reddens a sunset.  That dim red glow needs a much longer exposure to capture, which is exactly why totality is the most technically demanding part of the sequence to shoot well.

A Second Composite

A second, denser arrangement of the same event — sixteen frames stacked in two rows rather than radiating out from a single center like the composite up top.  Same eclipse, same night, just a different way of laying out the story.