These five pictures show the progress of the total lunar eclipse that took place on Saturday 3rd March 2007 as seen from Edinburgh, Scotland. The times below each image are GMT and north is up.

The start of the partial elcipse phase (when the Moon entered the Earth's umbral shadow) was timed for 21:30 GMT and the encroaching darkness can just be seen at the bottom of the first image. Seven minutes later this is much more obvious and, almost an hour later, a large portion of the Moon has been covered. Totality was timed for 22:44 but it still left the top of the Moon brighter than the rest. About half an hour later the Moon can be seen in mid eclipse and, because it hasn't passed through the centre of the Earth's shadow, the top still shows a brighter edge (last picture). Totality ended at 00:58 and the Moon exited the Earth's umbral shadow at 02:12 (but I had gone to bed by then!).

This was a truly excellent event - the weather was perfect, with little or no cloud and the coppery coloured Moon hanging in the sky was very weird to see.

The above pictures were taken with a Fuji S2 Pro digital camera with a Sigma APO 70-200mm EX lens at 200mm with a x2 converter (giving a focal length of 400mm). The exposures varied dramatically over the period of observation from 1/125s at f/5.6 (ISO 100) for the first image to 1/2s at f/5.6 (ISO 1600) for the last, a factor of 1024x from the first to last (7.5 magnitudes).