As you know there was a blood moon event that was visible in Australia. I took some photos of (about 70) I found it quite difficult and experimented a lot with settings in the dark!My biggest problem was focusing after I moved the tripod to track the moon before the trees obscured the image. If anyone has tricks on how to focus in the dark , I would love to hear from them

Those are very cool shots. You must have a very powerful camera lens.

Looking at the picture EXIF data, a mere 250mm (from the 55-250mm?) not that big by today's standards (big is 300mm or above now).

For this kind of pictures I use zoomed-in Liveview with manual focus (with very light fingers to avoid shaking the camera)(I also have a 450D). Since you are basically focusing on the infinite you don't need much DoF, but at that focal length the moon movement across the lens field is visible, so with a 2.5s exposure what you get is motion blur... Your choices are to either push the ISO (up to 1600...) to divide exposure time by 4, and/or zoom out a bit so that you can open at f/4 (yet another halving of exposure time), or underexpose and then recover tones by post-processing... All these will of course degrade the image a bit, but could still give a better image. Photography is knowing when to make the right compromises...

Another trick to make a fake picture: except for color the moon doesn't change much between the two pictures so you can merge them to keep the detail of the luminous one and the color of the dark one.

I was hoping someone would get some pictures. Thanks for sharing!

Excellent images. Thanks for sharing, wbool!

Ofnuts , thanks for your reply, I tried playing with different Iso settings but anything above 400 was extremely noisy. I used the live view at 10X with a magnifying glass to try and get the focus correct . The moon in total shadow was quite dark and only just showed on the live view. Increasing the aperture (smaller number) did not really help as the noise made it almost impossible to be sure of a correct focus.
As you said at that distance (Infinity) the focus should remain steady no matter where you aim the camera but in fact just the movement of the camera creates enough "shake" in my kit lens to de-focus. I had in fact thought of taping the lens adjusters ferrules while it was light but did not want to take a chance on contaminating the mechanisms with adhesive residuals.
I was in fact surprised how quickly the moon moved so in the end these settings were a compromise that seemed best last night.
It seems post processing is the answer. However post processing is only as good as your best focus from the camera. I have taken a quite a few shots at close intervals , so I will try to overlay these to get a nice result . Also I have not yet played with the raw shots to see if there is more to salvage.
I think my next opportunity is next year and then a wait of 32 years!

If the lens is set to manual focus it will not de-focus by itself. What you can do it make a small mark with Tip-Ex on the focus ring once you have focus when the moon is still clear enough, so that you can manually recover it if needed when the moon gets dark. At 800 ISO things get grainy but this is easier to fix than blurry...

People are over-protective with their cameras. I used to have a 55-250 with which I did a lot of macro-photography (with a close-up lens added) and it took a lot more abuse with dust and (salt)water splashes than yours will ever get with very hypothetical adhesive residuals. I no longer have it because I sold it, not because it broke down. And the 450D is still kicking.. it only went to the repair shop once due to a stuck flash (due to some sticky fluid that dripped inside according to the shop, but I never figured out where that came from). I'm thinking about sabotaging it so I can convince my SO that I can get a new one...

Very nice indeed...stayed up all nite to view and didn't see anything but a dim red line off on the horizon. We were under heavy, dense cloud cover. Maybe, in April?

Thanks for the pix. I was wanting to see it but I forgot.