New Zealanders across the country stayed up on Wednesday night to gaze at the first blood moon lunar eclipse in 40 years. Among them was Mark Richardson - who says he shouldn't have bothered.
Speaking to his The AM Show co-hosts on Thursday morning, Richardson deemed the phenomena "pretty underwhelming".
"It just looked like someone had tried to smudge [the moon] out," he said.
"It was like a half-sucked Oddfellow in the sky."
The sentiment was shared by his co-host Duncan Garner who set his alarm and sacrificed sleep to gaze into the skies.
"I got up just after 11pm and there were lots of people outside. It was like the All Blacks had won the World Cup again - what did we see?
"Sort of an orangey thing going across the moon."
But Richardson and Garner seem to be in the minority - social media was lit up with pictures and videos of the eclipse and thousands of people joined online to watch a live broadcast recorded in Torbay.
"It was pretty much the first lunar eclipse in years where the weather was good enough to see it all the way through," Stardome astronomer Tom List told RNZ.
"One thing you never quite know... is if it is going to be a deep dark red or an orangey red. This time it was very, very dark.
"What you are seeing [the red colour] is a little bit of scattered sunlight going through the Earth's atmosphere."
