This was an interesting project, one I didn’t plan to do. Based on the weather forecast, I didn’t plan to shoot the lunar eclipse and did zero prep or research for it. However, just before peak of the eclipse, the clouds cleared enough to see the moon.

Since my telescope is mounted permanently in the back yard, I quickly uncovered it and powered on the mount, camera, dew heaters, computer & focus motor. I didn’t have time for my normal calibration routines and, for some odd reason, when I told the scope to center on the moon it wanted nothing to do with it (thanks Murphy). I went outside and manually slewed the scope into position and started shooting.

Thanks to some great real-time guidance from my local astronomy club’s members over Discord, I was able to capture about 1000 shots of the moon during the eclipse. I took the best ~50 of those taken to combine for the final moon.

I recorded the average position of the moon during those frames and shot a 2-panel background mosaic of the stars over the next 3 nights. After building the star background, I cross referenced a sky atlas to position the stars for the final composite image.

Here’s the full-sized image: https://astronomynightly.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/moon_699_v2_wide16x9.png

Gear & imaging details:

• Explore Scientific ED127-FCD100 telescope
• Losmandy G11 mount with OnStep
• Player One Astronomy Poseidon-C camera
• Optolong L-eXtreme filter
• BoldMFG custom pier
• TeleGizmos 365 cover
• Moon image capture with SharpCap
• Stars image capture with NINA
• Processing in AutoStakkert, PIPP, Siril, AstroWizard and Photoshop