Weather permitting I plan to shoot this scene again during the December full moon and hope there is snow on the ground.
A Full Moon Rises above Garland Prairie
Tag: Moon
Objects in the Night Sky
The past several weeks have presented opportunities to photograph objects in the night sky. Exceptionally clear skies and dark nights allowed me to capture some long exposures of portions of the Milky Way. Other nights had interesting alignments of the moon with one of more planets.
Early in September, Venus and Jupiter aligned with the Moon in a nearly straight line in the western sky just after sunset. Compare this with an image taken a month earlier. In the course of a month, Mercury has dropped below the horizon while Venus and Jupiter have switched locations with Venus rising higher in the sky as Jupiter dips lower.
Moonset over Lake Mary
During the summer months the waxing crescent Moon sets in the west-northwest and lines up with Upper Lake Mary casting a long reflective glow on the water. With this in mind, I set out to capture images of the Moon just two days past new Moon and with only about 6% of the disk directly illuminated. During this lunar phase the dark portion of the Moon is faintly lit by reflected light called Earthshine.
I arrived early and watched the fading colors of sunset then began my wait for the skies to darken. The first image shows the crescent Moon fairly high in the sky with patches of clouds between it and the horizon.
About 45 minutes after the first image I was able to get this photograph as the Moon was approaching the horizon and leaving a long reflective trail across the lake.
Another Moonrise behind Cathedral Rock
A few weeks ago I attempted to photograph the nearly full moon as it rose from behind Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona. On previous shoots of this type, I have used The Photographers Ephemeris (TPE) to determine where I should be located so that the moon will rise between the spires of this rock. My experience with TPE has been very good and typically I only have to make small adjustments to my position to get the perfect alignment.
For this event, I used TPE but I also wanted to test PhotoPills, an iPhone app. One of the features of PhotoPills is AR (“augmented reality”). What AR does is use the phone camera and superimpose the position of the moon and its track on the image seen by the camera.
As I approached my shooting location (as previously determined by TPE), I checked my position using PhotoPills. PhotoPills was telling me that my position needed to change; i.e., that I was already too far south and had to move back to the north. According to PhotoPills, the moon would rise to the south (right) of Cathedral Rocks. I was fairly certain at this point that TPE was right and PhotoPills was wrong.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the first photo, the moon has begun to rise to the left (north) of Cathedral Rock. At this time, PhotoPills was still indicating it would rise to the right (south) of Cathedral Rock (i.e., the far right edge of the photo).
That’s a pretty big error.
It turns out that PhotoPills can only be as good as the GPS and compass in the iPhone and those may not be very accurate. PhotoPills should not be blamed for what is an iPhone issue.
As the moon rose, I quickly moved to the south to attempt to get it between the spires but it was rising faster than I could reposition myself and I did not get the photograph that I wanted. That’s fine—as I have done this before and have a few great shots of the moon rising behind Cathedral Rock. (See, for example, Moonrise 1; Moonrise 2)
I’ll be using TPE for my next moon rise photo. I like PhotoPills for some of the other features it has—just not this one.
A Lunar occultation of the planet Venus
There was an interesting astronomical phenomenon that occurred a few days ago that was worth viewing. On that morning, the crescent moon slowly moved towards and then in front of the planet Venus. This is known as a lunar occultation. For several hours that morning, folks could look up in the sky and quickly spot the crescent moon and then, a moment later, the bright point of light that was Venus.
Venus is bright enough to be seen in the daytime sky but is usually hard to locate. When it is near the moon—as it was on that morning—it becomes much easier.
I took a series of photographs every few minutes as the two celestial bodies drew closer together until, finally, the moon slid in front of Venus. It actually took about 30 seconds for the moon to move completely across the disk of Venus and, as it did so, the bright point of light grew dimmer until it blinked out.
A few hours later, the process reversed itself as the moon moved away and Venus appeared on the other side.
While I was taking images, I also had a pair of binoculars set up on a tripod and invited others to look through and view the pair. Most did not know that Venus could be seen in the day. All were amazed at the sight through the binoculars.
The images presented here were taken about 5 minutes before occultation, beginning of occultation, and a few minutes after Venus reappeared.