The Rising of the Harvest Moon

On two clear evenings the Harvest Moon rose red and and large over the Alberta prairie.

I present a short music video (linked to below) of time-lapse sequences of the Harvest Moon of 2020 rising. I shot the sequences through a small telescope to zoom in on the Moon’s disk as it rose over the flat horizon of the prairie near where I live. I love being able to see the horizon!

Note the effects of atmospheric refraction squishing the Moon’s disk close to the horizon. The Moon becomes more normal and spherical as it rose higher.

People sometimes think the refraction effect is responsible for making the Full Moon appear large on the horizon, but the atmosphere has nothing to do with it. The effect is strictly an optical illusion. The Moon is no bigger on the horizon than when it is higher in the sky.

The photo below shows a composite of images taken September 30, 2020.

The rising of the nearly Full Moon, the Harvest Moon of 2020, on September 30, from a site near home in Alberta, looking just south of due east this night. Refraction distorts the disk and atmospheric absorption reddens the disk toward the horizon. This is a multiple exposure composite of 6 images with the Canon 6D MkII through the 80mm A&M apo refractor at f/6 without field flattener. Taken as part of a time-lapse sequence with images every 2 seconds. The frames for this blend were taken 2 minutes apart, so selected from every 60 frames out of the sequence. All were at 1/8 second at ISO 100. Images stacked in Photoshop and blended with Lighten mode. The ground comes from the first image.

Note in the image below, from October 1, how much redder the Moon appears. That’s the effect of atmospheric absorption, in this case from dust and smoke in the air dimming and reddening the Moon (the same happens to the rising or setting Sun). At times this evening it looked like the Moon was in a total eclipse.

The Harvest Moon (the Full Moon of October 1, 2020) rising almost due east at the end of a country road in southern Alberta, near home. The horizon was smoky or dusty, so the Moon was very red as it rose, and looking almost like a totally eclipsed Moon. This is a blend of 6 exposures, all 1/2-second with the A&M 80mm f/6 apo refractor (for 480mm focal length) and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 400, taken as part of a 460-frame time-lapse sequence, with shots every 2 seconds. For this composite I choose 6 images at 2-minute intervals, so the Moon rose its own diameter between frames. The ground comes from the first image in the sequence when the lighting was brightest. The Moon rose at 7:35 pm this night, about 30 minutes after sunset. A mild Orton glow effect added to the ground with Luminar 4.

Below is the link to the time-lapse music video on Vimeo. It is in 4K. I used Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Bridge, and LRTimelapse to process the component images as raw files for the time-lapse sequences, as per tutorials in my Nightscape and Time-Lapse ebook, above.

Thanks for looking! Clear skies!

4 Replies to “The Rising of the Harvest Moon”

What a lovely video. Thanks for sharing it with us.

P.S. I was referring to the exposure for the time-lapse, where I assume you didn’t blend in a single foreground.

Alan, that’s a wonderful video and sequence. I’m curious how you selected the manual exposure so that there was still detail in the Moon and foreground. Did you bracket? Or from experience did you know which settings to use?

Alan Dyer says:

October 5, 2020 at 2:28 pm

Hello — I judged the exposure via histogram at the start with test shots then increased it somewhat from that knowing the scene would get darker. But all frames were shot with that same initial exposure and the ground just got dark. That’s inevitable. Increasing the exposure would only blow out the Moon, as I know from experience.

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