Ash from the eruption of a Chilean volcano, which has disrupted flights over the past few days, turned the usually copper-coloured "deep lunar eclipse" into a reddish colour.
"We were all very concerned with the cloud cover and there was a rain storm about 3am, but we were very fortunate and there were holes in the cover," Sydney Observatory manager Toner Stevenson said.
Everybody got to see totality and that lovely red moon and it was spectacular."
Ms Stevenson said about 130 Sydneysiders watched the eclipse - the first this year and the longest in more than a decade - at the observatory, including one woman dressed up as a vampire.
"We said come as a creature of the night," she said.
"There was [also] a child dressed very elegantly as if she was from another century, [as] a lady astronomer from the past, and a little boy dressed up a red superhuman."
A total lunar eclipse takes place when Earth casts its shadow over the moon. The surface of the moon sometimes turns a copper colour as light from the sun is refracted as it passes through our atmosphere.
Ms Stevenson said the rare occurrence of the reddish-orange moon "made you think about how that red effect occurs and how people in the past might have thought what was happening when the moon turned red".
100-minute period of totality is the longest since July 2000.
"The entire event will be seen from the eastern half of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and western Australia," US space agency NASA's veteran eclipse watcher, Fred Espenak, told Agence France-Presse.
The next total lunar eclipse is on December 10.
There will be partial solar eclipses on July 1 and November 25. The next total solar eclipse will take place on November 13, 2012, in a track running across North Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and southerly South America.
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