Blood Moon and Supermoon: stunning lunar eclipse leads to flood of terrible pictures

Since the moon is so small, and phone cameras so bad at zooming, it's quite hard to actually take a good one

The moon had a once in a generation night last night, as a Supermoon coincided with a Blood Moon and lit up the sky in a dramatic, bright red. And while it has led to some stunning photos, social networks have also been flooded with some pretty terrible ones, too.

Though the Supermoon Blood Moon was easier to photograph than many astrological events — since it lasted for much longer and didn’t require any special kit — taking a good picture was still difficult. In particular, attempting to get a shot of it from a mobile phone was nearly impossible — though the moon was big, it was still fairly small relative to most things, and phone’s lack of a decent zoom meant that it was quite small.

As pointed out in a tweet from social media site 9gag, many had hoped to capture stunning pictures of the nights events. And many failed.

The tweet prompted a range of replies from people who had tried do the same thing — and ended up with their own mostly black pictures, with a tiny reddish dot in the centre.

As we advised, the best way to take a photo of the moon with a phone or any other camera was to set it in its context — taking pictures of it against an exciting backdrop, rather than just in isolation. That means that you can genuinely see the size of the moon and don't have to zoom in, as well as getting a more unique photo.

You can see more good photos of the Supermoon in our round-up of the best pictures from around the world.