August - Full Moon turns red

This ominous picture shows our Moon undergoing a total lunar eclipse. During a lunar eclipse, Earth is positioned directly between the Sun and the Moon, blocking some of the Sun’s light. This casts a shadow across the Moon’s surface. The red colour is caused by the Sun’s rays interacting with Earth’s atmosphere.

This photo was taken during the eclipse’s totality, by two ESO colleagues at Paranal Observatory using an amateur telescope nicknamed “UT5” as a nod to its much larger siblings, the four 8-metre Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).