Starting just before midnight (ET) on March 13th but really not visible to the eye until about 20 minutes past, the western hemisphere got to experience a total lunar eclipse. The forecast here was iffy, but the optimistic forecast won and we had clear skies. While cold, it was quite a bit warmer than the January 2019 lunar eclipse and a lot less windy. The only downside was that for those of us in eastern time, it didn’t really get going until midnight and mid-eclipse wasn’t until 2:30am on the 14th.

Not trusting the weather report and needing to be away from home until about 9:30pm precluded setting up a larger telescope ahead of time but around 11:30pm I walked the little Seestar S30 outside and set it down, turned it on, walked back inside and controlled it from the comfort of a warm house.

I set the Seestar to take a picture every 60 seconds. I really should have been more aggressive. The video the Seestar produced took 5GB and I could have taken an image every 15 seconds and been fine, at least so far as storage went. During totality, I did have to run a battery out as the S30 was down to 27% and it was clear it wouldn’t make it through the eclipse.

Given the lack of opportunity to prepare, it was still a successful effort. I did go outside several times to compare my view of the eclipse to the S30’s and they roughly match. This was a much darker eclipse than in 2019. Some of that is probably the moon being a bit deeper in Earth’s shadow but some is likely more particulates in the atmosphere.

You can find the video of the eclipse on astrobin.