March 2025

Welcome to Hank’s March 2025 Astrophotography Blog. I was hoping this month to photograph the entire total lunar eclipse, but I at least got about half of it. The skies were cloudy, and through much of beginning of the eclipse I could see wispy clouds passing in front of the Moon. Shown here is a photo I took just before the eclipse began, then photos taken about every 10 minutes thereafter. I could control my Seestar telescope from inside the house, but I was back and forth, inside and outside, to keep an eye on the clouds. After I took the photo at 00:17 (17 minutes after midnight) I saw the big bank of clouds were just about to hide the last tiny crescent of the Moon, so I increased the gain on the telescope to see if I could spot the red glow of the lunar totality (7 minutes before the actual totality), and it came through! I then turned down the gain, and took one more photo of the crescent before the clouds covered the Moon. I took two images of nebulas this month, the Orion Nebula (the last one for the season, as Orion is heading behind our tall pines to the west) and the Rosette Nebula. This is the time of year when galaxies and globular clusters come out in force. For galaxies I was able to capture M96, M64, M61 and part of the Markarian’s Chain of galaxies. In January I posted a mosaic of…