The Lunar Eclipse 2018

On July 27th 2018 the Moon passed through the center of Earth's shadow, which resulted in the first central lunar eclipse since 2011. This alone would have been amazing, but to top things off, it was and will be the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century with 1hrs 43 minutes of totality. This was due to the fact that the moon was almost at its maximum distance from earth and therefore remained in the earth shadow for a longer period of time. During totality the Moon appears to be reddish (also called the Blood Moon) because of Rayleigh scattering, which is the the same effect that causes sunsets/rises to appear reddish and the daytime sky to appear blue. In Rostock the moon rise was scheduled to be 9.30 pm, and the moon would already rise in the state of totality. So planning what I wanted to shoot I opted to get the different phases of the lunar eclipse a s a composite image over the city of Rostock.

Huge thunderstorms over Brandenburg (ca. 200 km away) obscured the first part of the total lunar eclipse as the moon had the make it over the top of these majestic clouds. Here seen as a backdrop for the St.-Marien Church of Rostock.

But as seen in the first image here, huge storm clouds over Brandenburg obscured the first 40 minutes of totality, but at 10.10 pm the moon would eventually show behind the clouds and align perfectly with the Petri-Church, one of the shots I had envisioned (see below).

The moon eventually made it over the top of the clouds and aligned perfectly with the Petri-Church.

Now the waiting game began: I wanted to capture a sequence of the different stages of the lunar eclipse, which meant to shoot one image every 5 minutes over a period of 3 hours. I had locked down my composition using my Nikon D800e with a Nikkor 24-120 F4 AF-S VR lens set to 28 mm, this would allow me to keep everything in the frame. I started my stopwatch and would shoot one image every 5 minutes. The good thing in such scenes, you can use one of the twilight scenes as your base exposure, giving you considerably less noise. After that I would play with the exposure triangle to perfectly expose the moon. After all was said and done it was 1.15 am in the morning, the moon was bright again and I had captured the material I needed to finish my project. In photoshop I brought together the different moons and the base exposure, giving a final result that I am pretty happy with!!

No words needed... 3 hours of the Lunar Eclipse 2018 over the city skyline of Rostock.

Having a second camera handy, helped me to get more images of the eclipse and some unique perspectives of Rostocks inner city harbour during the lunar eclipse. I assembled some in the galleries below.

​And also if you would like a print of the images seen here, just use the contact form on this website.