Blood Moon 2025

Blood Moon, 2025

03/13/25 11:37PM

When I saw that there would be a lunar eclipse, I immediately went to my local photo rental shop to pick up a lens that would do this event justice. My 70-200mm just wasn’t going to cut it this time, despite being the magic lens in my bag.

I dropped by IE Photo Rentals in Pomona, CA, and picked up a Canon 400mm f2.8. What a behemoth of a lens. At almost 3 feet long and 1 foot in diameter, it felt like I was holding a bazooka in my hands. The carrying case barely fit into the tiny trunk of my Miata.

Big catch

It was 9:00PM after a very long day of work. I almost didn’t go. Maybe I just go into my backyard, even though the light pollution is the worst. But for the sake of the shot, I put on all my snowboarding clothes knowing that it was a windy and cold night in Joshua Tree with the chance of light rain. On the drive there, I was panicked every few miles when heavy rain would start and batter my windshield, or when the wind blew my car into the other lane.

“Maybe this is cursed. But we’re already committed so we’re chasing a chance now”

I had a full day’s worth of shooting for the last two days in studio, so I was down to my last battery with only half charge. With limited shots, limited time, and limited energy, I pulled up to the Sky’s the Limit Observatory to find a place to set up. The wind is howling, and the amount of layers I wore made me look like a marshmallow but I had no issues setting everything up.

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I catch the moon right before totality. Around 11:20 the moon was already looking like a crescent, except the majority of it was a deep burgundy red. The stars surrounding the eclipsed moon was something I had never seen in my life. As much as I wanted to savor the moment, lay there and listen to the Interstellar soundtrack, there was work to be done.

Getting the 400mm lens to be stable was no easy task. Every minute movement shifted the frame completely off. And the strong winds certainly did not help either. Small tip: bring a sandbag to stabilize your tripod, and if your tripod has a middle shaft, bring it down closer to the ground for additional stability.

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Finally, eclipse totality was achieved, and I’m in position and snapping away. When doing nighttime shoots, and specifically for astrophotography, I often feel like a sniper. Keep your heart and mind still. Let that transfer to your hands, and breathe out when you pull the trigger. You’ll be guaranteed a clean accurate shot or a picture with no blur, whichever tickles your fancy.

I could finally breathe for a moment, so I leaned back to watch the stars, find my favorite constellations, and fall into the Interstellar soundtrack for the 100th time.

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After I packed up, I walked over to find Evelyn and Adam, two park guides at Joshua Tree observing the moon with some telescopes! They had a lot of really cool equipment: a telescope you could mount your phone to to take a far away photo without tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, a digital long exposure stacking telescope to observe galaxies in deep space, and a normal telescope to look very closely at the lunar eclipse.

Astrophotography has come a long way, and it’s cool to be able to see and take amazing pictures of objects so far away they’re literally in the past. Check out the difference between the picture taken with the iPhone camera zoomed all the way in versus the one taken with the phone mounted telescope!

iPhone 15 Pro Max Zoom

Phone-mounted Telescope

Prints of this year’s blood moon are available in the shop! Get em while they’re hot!