The “worm” full moon became a beautiful total lunar eclipse from 2:26 am to 3:31 am on March 14, 2025. During totality, when the moon is fully covered by the earth’s shadow, it turns shades of red and is often called a “blood moon”.
I found out from The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) app that the lunar eclipse would occur very high in the sky (49 to 43 degrees in elevation) on the southwest horizon (208 – 228 degrees true north) during totality. My goal of putting a widely recognizable landmark next to a close up view of the eclipse would require something that is very tall!
The top of the Washington Monument is approximately 555 feet tall. I used the Photopills app to determine how far away I would need to stand in order to line up the moon over the top of the Washington Monument.
The weather forecast for DC was very “iffy” regarding cloud cover. As I departed Northern Virginia at 12:40 am, the skies were crystal clear. We made the 50 minute drive to DC with no traffic and easily found parking on Constitution Avenue very close to the Washington Monument. I used the “AR” function in the Photopills app to fine tune where I should stand to put the eclipse at the top of the Washington Monument for the start of totality. This worked very well, and it put me in the right place at the right time to get the shot. Unfortunately, as soon as we got in place, a thick layer of low clouds began to roll in. Shooting the eclipse became much more challenging. You had to wait for gaps in the clouds to pass in front of the moon to get a usable shot. Often the eclipse would disappear completely and reappear briefly before disappearing again. As the moon was constantly moving across the sky, it became a guessing game where to exactly set up your camera so that the eclipse would be directly over the monument when the eclipse would appear. The cloud moisture in the air also filtered out light from the moon, making the already shadowed moon dimmer. This made getting the moon in sharp focus difficult, and also required higher ISOs and longer shutter speeds than what is usually desired. Despite these challenges, we were able to get a handful of nice images over the hour of totality.
I brought two cameras, one with a 15-35 mm wide angle lens to get the whole monument in the shot with the lunar eclipse, and one with a 100-500 mm telephoto lens to get close up images of the lunar eclipse with the top of the monument. Using a wide angle lens to capture the scene makes the lunar eclipse very small! I still like the shot, as it gives you a sense of the overall view of the scene from the ground level. After getting a few wide angle shots at the beginning of totality, I switched to shooting with the telephoto lens for the rest of the eclipse. My plan was to get a series of shots spanning from the beginning, peak, and end phases of totality. For each of the closeup images to be made, I had to focus and expose for the moon, and then separately focus and expose for the monument. Each pair of images were then manually combined in photoshop for exposure blending and focus stacking in the final image.
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