20150928-Bloodmoon-Header-001

There has been an extensive coverage of the recent lunar eclipse (bloodmoon). I also headed out in the middle of the night to photograph that event.

The night before I prepared everything in such a way, that I just had to get up in the night, jump into my clothing and motorcycle gear, take the backpack and head out.

I used my Nikon D750 with the Tamron 150-600 mm lens and a MeFoto compact tripod. The location I chose is a small artificial hill near the Hanover fair grounds (former Expo 2000 site). We don’t have any mountains here in the Hanover region, so I reckoned that the hill would make a good observation point.

The eclipse startet somewhere around 3 AM, with the “bloodmoon phase” occuring from 04:11 AM. Since I had to go to work that day (it occured the night from Sunday to Monday) I opted to skip the partial eclipse phase and only shoot the blood moon.

I got up at 3:30 AM, jumped into my stuff and onto my motorcycle. I rode 14 km to the hill and set up my tripod. It turned out I was far from being the only one who chose that location. In the time I stayed at the location (4 AM – roughly 5 AM) about 10 people came and went. I took the first image at 4 AM, while the moon was already mostly red with only a small white strip at the bottom.

20150928-Bloodmoon001I continued shooting for another 15 minutes, then thick fog came up and the moon was hidden. The shooting was over. I managed to take 27 photos with 8 “keepers” in terms of quality. But since all those keepers showed the same moon I chose only to show one of them.

To illustrate how thick the fog was here is a shot of the former Expo 2000 site.

 

20150928-Dutch-Pavillon-001The building on the right is the ruin of the dutch pavillon. It was never demolished or reused as nobody was reponsible for it. Looks a little like an alien spaceship that landed right here. The fog became even thicker, so that the pavillon (around 600 m from the hill) became invisible. I stayed at location until around 5AM, hoping the fog would clear. But as it became thicker by the minute I packed my stuff and mounted my bike again.

A very foggy and unpleasant bike ride later I entered the office at 05:45 AM. I brewed a strong coffee and started my week.