On Friday night the Harvest Moon rose amid the arching shadow of the Earth.
This was the view on Friday, September 16 at moonrise on the Red Deer River. The view is from the Orkney Viewpoint overlooking the Badlands and sweeping curve of the river.
Above is the wide arch of the dark shadow of the Earth rising into the deepening twilight. Almost dead centre in the shadow is the Full Moon, the annual Harvest Moon.
Hours earlier the Moon passed through the shadow of our planet out at the Moon’s distance from Earth, creating a minor penumbral eclipse. No part of that eclipse, such as it was anyway, was visible from here.
But the alignment did place the Moon in the middle of our planet’s shadow projected into our atmosphere, as it does at every sunset and sunrise.
But it takes a very clear sky for the shadow to stand out as well as this in the darkening sky. I like how the curve of the shadow mirrors the curve of the river.
This is a marvellous spot for photography. I shared the site with one other photographer, at far right, who also came to capture the rising of the Harvest Moon.
The image is a 7-segment panorama with a 20mm lens, stitched with Adobe Camera Raw.
I could not have asked for a more perfect night for a lunar eclipse. It doesn’t get any better!
On Sunday, September 27, the Moon was eclipsed for the fourth time in two years, the last in a “tetrad” of total lunar eclipses that we’ve enjoyed at six-month intervals since April 2014. This was the best one by far.
This is through the TMB 92mm refractor for a focal length of 500mm using the Canon 60Da at ISO 400 for 1/250 second.
The timing was perfect for me in Alberta, with the Moon rising in partial eclipse (above), itself a fine photogenic site.
In the top image you can see the rising Moon embedded in the blue band of Earth’s shadow on our atmosphere, and also entering Earth’s shadow on its lunar disk. This was a perfect alignment, as lunar eclipses must be.
For my earthly location I drove south to near the Montana border, to a favourite location, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, to view the eclipse over the sandstone formations of the Milk River.
More importantly, weather forecasts for the area called for perfectly clear skies, a relief from the clouds forecast – and which did materialize – at home to the north, and would have been a frustration to say the least. Better to drive 3 hours!
This was the second lunar eclipse I viewed from Writing-on-Stone, having chased clear skies to here in the middle of the night for the October 8, 2014 eclipse.
I shot with three cameras: one doing a time-lapse through the telescope, one doing a wide-angle time-lapse of the Moon rising, and the third for long-exposure tracked shots during totality, of the Moon and Milky Way.
This is a stack of 5 x 2-minute tracked exposures for the sky and 5 x 4-minute untracked exposures for the ground to smooth noise. The Moon itself comes from a short 30-second exposure to avoid overexposing the lunar disk. Illumination of the ground is from starlight. All exposures with the 15mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. The camera was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker.
That image is above. It shows the eclipsed Moon at left, with the Milky Way at right, over the Milk River valley and with the Sweetgrass Hills in the distance.
The sky was dark only during the time of totality. As the Moon emerged from Earth’s shadow the sky and landscape lit up again, a wonderful feature of lunar eclipses.
While in the above shot I did layer in a short exposure of the eclipsed Moon into the long exposure of the sky, it is still to accurate scale, unlike many dubious eclipse images I see where giant moons have been pasted into photos, sometimes at least in the right place, but often not.
Lunar eclipses bring out the worst in Photoshop techniques.
This is a single exposure taken through the TMB 92mm refractor at f/5.5 for 500 mm focal length using the Canon 60Da at ISO 400 for 8 seconds, the longest I shot during totality. The telescope was on the SkyWatcher HEQ5 mount tracking at the lunar rate.
Above is a single closeup image taken through the telescope at mid-totality. I exposed for 8 seconds to bring out the colours of the shadow and the background stars, as faint as they were with the Moon in star-poor Pisces.
I shot a couple of thousand frames and processing of those into time-lapses will take a while longer, in particular registering and aligning the 700 I shot at 15-second intervals through the telescope. They show the Moon entering, passing through, then exiting the umbra, while it moves against the background stars.
With the latest success, I’ve had my fill of lunar eclipses for a while. Good thing, as the next one is not until January 31, 2018, before dawn in the dead of winter.
With the mild night, great setting, and crystal clear skies, this “supermoon” eclipse could not have been better. It was a super eclipse.
Tonight the Full Moon rose paired with Jupiter, in the colourful twilight over Silver City, New Mexico.
Using The Photographer’s Ephemeris app, I scouted out the location last night for the shoot tonight, February 3.
I drove west of Silver City to a viewpoint on Boston Hill overlooking the town east to the rising Moon.
The Full Moon of February has come to be called the “Snow Moon,” appropriate for many parts of the continent now enduring record snowfalls. But here, we enjoyed summer-like temperatures and a decided lack of snow.
The Moon rose into a clear sky accompanied by Jupiter, now 4 days before its annual opposition date. At opposition we pass between the Sun and an outer planet, in this case Jupiter. This puts Jupiter opposite the Sun, so it rises as the Sun sets.
The Full Moon also always lies opposite the Sun, so tonight the Full Moon joined Jupiter in the sky.
To capture the scene I shot several panoramas, each consisting of several segments, to take in the broad sweep of the horizon. The scene above records the pink “Belt of Venus,” created by sunlight lighting the upper atmosphere to the east in the half hour or so after sunset down here on Earth.
Once the sky got darker, Jupiter stood out better, shining to the left of the Moon.
Jupiter is now also closest to Earth and brightest for 2015. It will dominate our eastern sky for the rest of the winter and early spring, eventually shining to the south as night falls in late spring.
The Hunter’s Moon of 2014 turned deep red during a total lunar eclipse.
It wouldn’t be an eclipse without a chase!
To see and shoot this total eclipse of the Hunter’s Moon I had to chase clear skies, seeking out the only clear area for hundreds of miles around, requiring a 3-hour drive to the south of me in Alberta, to near the Canada-US border, at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.
It was worth the midnight trek, though I arrived on site and got set up with just 10 minutes to go before the start of totality.
But I was very pleased to see the sky remain mostly clear for all of totality, with only some light haze adding the glow around the eclipsed Moon. Remarkably, the clouds closed in and hid the Moon just after totality ended.
This is a single 15-second exposure at ISO 400 with a Canon 60Da, shooting through an 80mm apo refractor at f/6 and on an equatorial mount tracking the sky at the lunar rate. I shot this shortly after mid-totality. It shows how the Moon’s northern limb, closest to the edge of the umbral shadow, remained bright throughout totality.
It shows lots of stars, with the brightest being greenish Uranus at the 8 o’clock position left of the Moon, itself shining in opposition and at a remarkably close conjunction with the Moon at eclipse time.
More images are to come! But this is the result of fast processing after a dawn drive back home and an all-nighter chasing and shooting an eclipse.
The Full Moon rises over the sandstone formations of Red Rock Coulee, Alberta.
This was moonrise – a super Moonrise – on Friday, July 11, 2014.
Publicized as yet another “super moon,” this moonrise was certainly excellent for me, with superb skies at Red Rock Coulee in southern Alberta. There’s no way anyone would be able to detect the fact this Moon was a little closer and larger than most Full Moons of 2014. But it was still a fine sight.
Here, you see it sitting in the pink Belt of Venus fringing the dark blue band of Earth’s shadow rising in the east just after sunset. The already red rocks are lit by the warm light of the western twilight.
The main photo is an HDR stack of 6 exposures, to capture the range in brightness from bright sky to darker foreground.
This night, as it is for a week or so at mid-month, reddish Mars was sitting just above blue-white Spica in Virgo. They are visible here as a double star in the moonlit southwestern sky. Saturn is to the left. This is a single exposure.
It was another perfect night – warm, dry and bug free, for 3 hours of moonlight time-lapse shooting, as well as taking these still images.
The Harvest Moon rises into the dark arc of the Earth’s shadow.
What a perfect night this was. The Full Moon rose into a crystal clear sky, tinted with the dark blue shadow of our planet arching across the eastern sky.
The main image above is a 7-section panorama sweeping from northeast to southeast, but centred on the rising Harvest Moon rising almost due east.
The Moon came up just before the Sun set. The panorama below shows that scene. It’s a crop of a full 360°, 45,000-pixel-wide panorama, taken just as the Sun was setting almost due west and the Moon was rising 180° away in the east.
I took both panoramas with a Canon 5D MkII and 50mm Sigma lens, with the segments at a 30° spacing. That way I take 12 segments to cover a full 360°, a habit leftover from the days of shooting photo pans for planetarium projection systems consisting of 12 Kodak slide projectors.
My previous post showed some still frames from a time-lapse movie of the rising Harvest Moon. The final movie is above, assembled from 670 frames taken at 2-second intervals with the Canon 60Da and 200mm lens. I’ve shot this subject a few times now, but this was my best capture of the rising Full Moon at harvest time, always the most photogenic Moon it seems.
The waxing Moon rises into a colourful twilight sky over the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park.
What a great night it was last night! Warm summer temperatures (at last!) allowed for shirtsleeve shooting even well after dark. To shoot on the warm August night I went out to Dinosaur Provincial Park, a magical place to be at sunset and in the summer twilight. The colours on the badlands are wonderful. It’s earth-tones galore, with the banded formations from the late Cretaceous blending with the sagebrush and prairie flowers.
This was the scene after sunset, as the waxing Moon rose into the eastern sky coloured by the blue band of Earth’s shadow, the pink Belt of Venus and dark blue streaks of cloud shadows converging to the point opposite the Sun. That’s where the Moon will be Tuesday night when it’s full. But last night it was a little west of the anti-solar point.
I managed to grab this image as soon as I got to my photo spot on the Badlands Trail, just in time to catch the last rays of the setting Sun illuminating the bentonite hills of the Badlands. Both shots are frames from a 450-frame time-lapse, taken with a device that also slowly panned the camera across the scene over the 90-minute shoot.
It, and three other time-lapses I shot after dark, filled up 40 gigabytes of memory cards. It’s been a terabyte summer for sure!
The Amazing Sky 