On Tuesday, here in Melbourne, we witnessed a lunar eclipse – when the sun, moon and earth are in perfect alignment, causing the earth’s shadow to fall on the moon. The moon actually began to move into the earth’s shadow at 3.58 pm and was fully immersed in shadow by 5.06pm We couldn’t see it at this stage as it didn’t really get dark here until just after 6.15pm.

The moon rose at 5.49pm, with the full eclipse remaining until about 6.25pm and the eclipse disappearing altogether by about 7.30pm.

I couldn’t see the moon in the full stage of its eclipse but it rose high enough above the horizon for me to see it while it was coming out of the shadow of the earth. My first view of the moon was when it was about 3/4 eclipsed and over nearly an hour it returned to be completely visible.

I was surprised at how bright it was. When I used my camera on its automatic exposure setting, everything was over exposed. I ended up photographing it in manual mode and at settings that I thought would have significantly underexposed any images.

These are my photos of various stages of the eclipse.