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Lunar Eclipses

I went to Germany to work on my apartment, visit my old highschool chemistry peeps for our 46th (!) class reunion, but also to watch and photograph the total lunar eclipse on September 7th! It was a very efficient trip, as I also included Paris for a few romantic days with my love.

Greifswald, Germany, where I have the apartment, is in a Bortle Class 4 zone, with many Class 3 areas around. That part of Germany is the least populated, hence, the least light pollution. That made the eclipse a different experience, I had so far only photographed eclipses in Class 5 areas, except for this eclipse and one other, which was also close to twilight. As with last time in 2022, the moon was washed out by twilight. This year, it came fully eclipsed over the horizon, as Germany was not in the center of the eclipse path, sunset was 3 minutes later. As a result, I didn't even see the moon until about 30 minutes past moonrise. The brightness of the moon is about 12-13 stops more dim when fully eclipsed, compared to a full moon. The day to night difference is about 16 stops, so one needs to wait until twilight is dark enough to even see the blood moon, about 3-4 stops before complete darkness. The image above shows you the whole experience from a faint moon coming out of the sky to the full moon.

If you weren't able to witness the lunar eclipse, there is another chance coming up soon, in March of 2026! That eclipse will be visible across the entire USA and eastern Asia/Australia. However, to see the full eclipse cycle, one needs to be in the western US or very eastern Asia, see below's image from TimeandDate.com.

I plan to be there and perhaps conduct a workshop for people who want to join me, more on that later. If you want to learn any of the above, lots of details about lunar eclipses, what you need, where to go, how to plan for it, you can buy my eBook from my Patreon channel. The eBook is almost 40 pages long with everything you ever wanted to know about this type of photography. Once you buy it, you will receive future updates for free, as they become available. I plan to update it within the next few months, to be ready for next March.

Jürgen on Social Media

Very unfortunately, Meta decided to close my Instagram account, because I violated their Terms & Conditions. Those are some 30 pages long and I never got an answer as to how exactly my fine art posts were deemed offensive. I have always been decidedly polite when commenting or posting. My appeals didn't go anywhere, I only got a quick response that they still think I am in violation.Along with Instagram, its 1700 posts and 5000 followers, that also closed by Facebook account of 10 years as well as my professional Facebook page with 1500 followers.

Needless to say that this is a highly frustrating experience, as it takes away what used to be an important part of my photography activity and business, as well as my social interactions, because I used Facebook to stay in touch with many far away friends all over the world.

I tried to make new accounts with different emails but it seems that Meta is blocking me, the person, not just my accounts.

To find outlets for my art, I decided to move on and embrace some other options. None of which are nearly as active or effective as IG and FB, but at least some of them don't inundate you with commercials and harvest your data for more ads.

Going forward, you can find me on these platforms, some of which I had already been on, some of which are new to me.

• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Mastodon & PixelFed
• Tumblr
• Vero
• TikTok

I am also on Behance and YouTube, but not very active on either. And out of principal, I still find Snapchat and Twitter/X utterly useless.

My username on any of these platforms is JMLobert. Find me on LinkTr.ee for all those links.

LinkedIn is more for professional interactions.

Flickr might be outdated, but it still has a lot of active people and my own history goes back to 2011! And it is the only platform that is not optimized for mobile phones, it displays horizontal/landscape photos in all their glory (at least on your computer).

Mastodon and PixelFed are very interesting. Mastodon is more for blogging, PixelFed is what Instagram should be: a platform to post photos, without data mining and incessant ads, both are public domain, but sadly slow and buggy. I'll give it a chance.

The same goes for Vero, a very similar experience, but it seems to be limited in how many people will see you, I need to be pro-active in finding people myself. Neither of these two platforms has an "algorithm" to suggest posts based on your browsing history.

Tumblr is still relevant and apparently good for niche art like mine, so I am looking forward to re-establishing myself there. And it's a very clean platform, too.

And, of course, TikTok seems to remain here to stay. It's more geared towards short form videos, but has seen a surge in image posts.

If you have been connected to me on Instagram or Facebook, I would love to reconnect with you on any of these platforms. I hope to see you there!

Patreon Update: What's new?

My Patreon channel now has about 450 articles from the past six years. Here's a selection of what has been added since my last newsletter.

• A night photography review of the Nikon Z5II and two posts on upgrading from Canon and Nikon DSLRs to mirrorless cameras, all my equipment posts are public
• Several posts on Lightroom and CameraRaw updates and new features, see final thought below!
• In-depth insights into noise types and why you should use the lowest possible ISO, what causes the gaps in star trails and how to avoid or minimize them and two techniques revisited: refractograms and trichroic conversions. All of these are for the Tier 2 level.
• And, of course, lots of inspiration with photos from my recent photos shoots, "how I got the shot" explanations and more.

You can find more than 100 public posts on my channel, which you can read without payment, just follow the channel. Look under COLLECTIONS - PUBLIC or simply scroll down. And if you like what you see, consider signing up for one of my paid tiers.

Final tip: if you are using Lightroom, turn off the "automatically write data into XMP files" in the catalog preferences. Having this on will bloat both your XMP files as well as your catalog file. Adobe is aware and will hopefully fix it soon.

Until next time, please find me online here (all updated with social networks).