We Saw The Whole Of The Moon

By Matt Woods

This past November we were lucky enough to observe one of the more beautiful astronomical events, a Total Lunar Eclipse. There’s something magical about seeing a blood-orange moon in the night sky, and it’s perfect for Astrophotography as we don’t have the blinding light from the moon hiding stars around it.

This eclipse was going to be already in totality (Within Earth’s inner shadow called the Umbra) as it rose above the horizon which caused an issue for us at the Observatory. Due to the trees surrounding the viewing area, we knew this would prevent us from seeing the blood-orange moon at the Observatory, meaning we had to go offsite. This also gave us a chance to organise one big event with the help of our friends at the Astronomical Group of Western Australia (AGWA), Stargazers Club WA, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), which they all were enthusiastic about.

With the lovely Swan River meandering through our city, it creates lots of stunning views to enjoy, so the plan was to make sure we chose the site that showed the best view possible and also be able to handle hundreds to thousands of people. This was important so we didn’t get the same issues we had with the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in December 2020 when we had 4,000 or so people at Coogee Beach. We ended up choosing Matilda Bay next to the University of Western Australia, which has a lovely little beach, plenty of space if we end up getting thousands of people, and gorgeous views of the Perth CBD with Kings Park, and the Narrows Bridge. As usual with eclipses,

we were going to live stream the eclipse for timeanddate.com and with the delay in seeing the moon, we realised with Matilda Bay, we could provide Time and Date with footage of the spectacular scenery as an option to show on their live stream. We book Matilda Bay for the event, and I started the process of getting our volunteers and telescopes organised, plus also started praying for good weather on the night.

I obviously wasn’t praying hard enough, because, as we got closer and closer to the day, the weather reports were getting worse. This is why clouds are jerks and our mortal enemy, they always try to and ruin an astronomical event. After a day of doing radio and TV interviews, it was time to head down and start getting ready for the event. Absolutely heartbroken, I drove down under completely cloudy skies until just before I drove past the Perth CBD. That’s when there started to be a glimmer of hope that we might be able to see the last total lunar eclipse until September 2025 as the blue sky started to reveal itself. Arriving at Matilda Bay gave me more hope as we had this lovely fresh breeze and the clouds receding faster so we had a good chance that would see the eclipse.

With everything set up, live interviews with Channel 9 news, Channel 10 news, and Time and Date completed, it was time to start the event and welcome the 400 or so visitors that came along to experience this magical event with us, and they weren’t disappointed. While we waited for the Moon, the visitors played at the beach and set up their equipment, we even had a playful dolphin decide to check us out and provide some of the visitors with amazing shots of it playing in the water. We did have to wait until 15 minutes before the end of totality, but we managed to see the Moon in all its glory, and you could hear the collective amazement of the crowd. We were lucky enough that the cloud stayed away for the rest of the night so we could see the whole of the second partial phase of the eclipse as well.

While I was pleased the night went extremely well, the highlight for me as it always is, is seeing the looks on people’s faces as they saw the blood-orange moon through binoculars and/or telescopes. It doesn’t matter how old you are, it’s always the same expression of amazement and wonder. One added advantage of being able to live stream the event is that we’re able to show a lot of visitors at the same time, what the Moon looks like through the telescope on one of my screens. We couldn’t do the live stream this time without the help of Paywise who lent us their 5G mobile router and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development who lent us their Starlink satellite dish which was our backup, but we tested it for them as we’ll need it for the Total Solar Eclipse in Exmouth next April.

The funniest thing about eclipses is that once you’ve seen your first one, the next thing you want to do is find out when the next one is. While the next Total Lunar Eclipse we’ll see in Perth won’t be until September 2025, we do have the Total Solar Eclipse in Exmouth (70% partial solar eclipse in Perth) next April, the saying “the best things come to those who wait” is very true.

Image Credit: Michael Goh Image Credit: Roger Groom