Saturday night (here in NZ) saw the start of the shortest total eclipse of the moon this century, lasting a total of 7 minutes, being visible over parts of Asia, Australia, NZ and the western half of the Americas.

Here in NZ it started around 11pm, with totality peaking at 1am, so it was a later night than normal, but with the clocks going back for the end of daylight savings (it is autumn (fall)) there was an extra hours sleep to be had in the morning.

So I had a go at getting some photos from the back garden with some of the results shown in the montage below.

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People from the northern hemisphere will notice the moon looking a bit odd, not just from the eclipse or red colouration in the last photo, but from the moon being upside down compared to what you are used to (yes, I really am in the southern hemisphere so we are effectively upside down compared to you).

The shape of the earth's shadow is very obviously curved, so yes, the earth is round!

Photographing the eclipse is fun as with the first few pictures you take the photo as if it is daylight, so the first one is f8, 1/200 sec at ISO400 and the last one needed a tripod as it was f13 8 second exposure at ISO800. The difference in the brightness is incredible, what is the dark shadow in the first images is actually the images you see in the last, being about 6400 times dimmer (which is why I needed the tripod and the exposure time being 1600 times longer).

It was really hard to pull out the redness at the top of the moon without over exposing the bottom part of the image, so my last photo is probably my best one.

The photos were taken using a Canon 1100D DSLR with a 75-300mm zoom lens.

What is really amazing is that the human eye just looks at the moon and sees it in full detail be it in full illumination or in eclipse. You can then go inside, turn on the lights and your eyes instantly adapt. It is only when you try to take photos and look at the difference in settings showing the light levels changing by massive amounts that you realize how amazing human vision and the image processing that our brains can do is.

So maybe our heads aren't that broken after all.

We had the perfect night sky, lay-back chairs, a perfect view and an esky full of beer. We sang moon songs, there were moon poems, and moon stories to make the hair curl.

Cloud.

More beer, more smiles, a beaut night.