It took a last-minute chase, but I managed to capture the total eclipse of the Moon on March 14, 2025.
It would not be an eclipse without a chase. Solar eclipses of the total kind almost always involve travel, often to exotic locales around the world. But total lunar eclipses come to you, as they can be seen from an entire hemisphere of the planet.
Except there’s one problem โ clouds! Over the last decade since 2014, of the eight total lunar eclipses (TLEs) I was home in Alberta for, I had to chase into clear skies for all but one. A recounting of one such chase from January 2019 is here.
Only for the TLE before this most recent (on November 8, 2022) was I able to stay home to watch it. Though in that case a snowstorm the day before made the roads and travel poor, so I had to stay home. I recounted that eclipse story here. You’ll find links to my other lunar eclipse stories below.
Once again, for the March 13/14, 2025 TLE, weather prospects looked poor. Not just in my area but in many regions of the continent. But there was hope!
Astrospheric and Environment Canada cloud forecast + Moon information
The forecast cloud cover showed home to be hopeless. But a clear area was supposed to be open in southwestern Alberta, marked by the red circle above. That’s Waterton Lakes National Park, just on the US border. It’s a favourite place of mine for nightscape photography anyway (see my blog from this past summer here).
The chart above from the app Astrospheric shows the clear hole, and the dark blue on the time-line indicates the period with no clouds. Note how it coincides with the wavy line below which shows Moon altitude, with the orange and red regions indicating when the eclipse would take place. Looks good! So I made my plan to chase.
I knew the area well enough to know the site would be a good one for the eclipse, and the Moon’s location to the south. But it pays to check. I use The Photographer’s Ephemeris as my main photo planning app.
TPE Plot of Sightlines
It showed the sightline toward the Moon during the eclipse as straight down Upper Waterton Lake. My chosen spot was on the lakeside Waterton Avenue, where I could set up both the wide-angle camera and a telescope without having to heft gear any distance. Winter road closures also limited my site choices. Indeed, in winter the Park is quiet, with only a few hotels and restaurants open, and many businesses boarded up.
TPE 3D Simulation
Switching to the companion app TPE 3D (above) showed a preview of the landscape and the Moon’s position in the sky relative to the scene below.
Compare the simulation to the real thing below! Pretty accurate, except for the scattered clouds that drifted through.
This is a blend of separate images for the sky and ground: a stack of two untracked images for 60 seconds each for the ground, then a third exposure for the sky and untrailed stars, taken immediately afterwards with the tracker motor on, for 30 seconds, all with the Canon RF15-35mm lens wide-open at f/2.8 and at 20mm, on the Canon R5 at ISO 1600. Separate shorter tracked exposures of 15, 8 and 4 seconds blended in kept the lunar disk from overexposing, showing it more as the eye saw it.
The above image is a blend of tracked exposures for the Moon and sky, with untracked exposures for the ground. I shot them just before mid-totality at 1 am MDT. That image was second in priority. First, was a panorama. That result is below.
This is a panorama of four segments at 30ยบ spacing, taken in two passes: first untracked for 30 seconds each, then a second pass immediately afterwards with the tracker motor on, also for 30 seconds each, all with the Canon RF15-35mm lens wide-open at f/2.8 and at 20mm, on the Canon R5 at ISO 1600, with the camera in landscape orientation. Separate shorter exposures of 15s, 10s, 5s and 2.5s at ISO 400 were blended in to preserve the lunar disk more as the eye saw it.
I shot this scene just as totality began, to ensure I got it. While the Moon was in clear sky before totality during the partial phase, sure enough as the Moon became fully eclipsed, the clouds wafting over the mountains threatened to move in and obscure the view.
Luckily, while they did hide the Moon now and then, they opened up enough for good views and images for a few minutes at a time throughout the eclipse.
For the panorama I processed the image for a more monochromatic look, to resemble the naked-eye view, but with the Moon appearing as a red globe in the sky, the only colour in the scene. (I shot the tracked shots with the MSM Nomad tracker I reviewed here.)
The site proved excellent, but it was a cold night! While the temperature was only just below freezing, the brisk Waterton wind off the lake made it a chilly experience watching the eclipse for two hours. I was actually being hit by ice pellets blowing off the lake.
I decided not to set up the telescope for close-ups; the wide-angle images were the priority anyway from such a scenic spot.
A single untracked 15-second exposure with the RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and 17mm on the Canon R5 at ISO 3200.
But I am not complaining. I got the eclipse, once again by chasing to where the weather predictions said it would be clear. The above is my requisite trophy shot.
Had I stayed home I would have been clouded out. Had predictions called for clear skies at home, I would not have made the trip to Waterton to enjoy the eclipse over its wonderful scenery.
The next total lunar eclipse is September 7, 2025, six months after this eclipse. But it is visible from the opposite hemisphere to this one, with no part of that eclipse visible from North America. I will not chase that far for a TLE!
The March 3, 2026 TLE from Alberta
After that, and after a passage of one lunar year (355 days or 12 lunar cycles) since the March 14, 2025 TLE, I have a chance for another total lunar eclipse from home, with western North America favoured. As I preview above, it’ll be an early morning event on March 3, 2026, with the eclipsed Moon setting in the west in the pre-dawn hours.
Sounds like another chase to a mountain site with the red Moon over the Rockies. That’ll be the plan!
I present a selection of new images taken at local World Heritage Sites, along with some advanced nightscape shooting tips.
I’m fortunate in living near scenic landscapes here in southern Alberta. Many are part of UNESCO World Heritage Sites that preserve regions of unique scenic and cultural significance. In early June I visited several to shoot nightscapes of starry skies over the scenic landscapes.
I also took the opportunity to experiment with some new shooting techniques. So I’ve included some tips and techniques, most of the advanced variety.
First up was Dinosaur Provincial Park.
The Milky Way and its core region in Sagittarius and Scorpius is here low over the Badlands landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta.
After nearly a month of rain and clouds, the night of May 31/June 1 proved wonderfully clear at last. I headed to a favourite location in the Red Deer River valley, amid the eroded badlands formations of Dinosaur Provincial Park, site of late-Cretaceous fossil finds.
The bright core of the Milky Way in Sagittarius would be in the south. With the night only three weeks before summer solstice, from the Park’s latitude of 50.5ยฐ N the sky would not get astronomically dark. But it would be dark enough to show the Milky Way well, as above in this framing looking south on the Trail of the Fossil Hunters.
However, May and June are “Milky Way Arch” months, at least for the northern hemisphere. The full sweep of the northern Milky Way, from Perseus in the northeast to Sagittarius in the southeast, then stretches across the sky โ high enough to be impressive, but low enough (unlike later in summer) to be framable in a horizontal panorama.
This is a 200ยฐ panorama of the arch of the northern Milky Way rising over the Badlands landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta.
To capture the arc of the Milky Way I shot a panorama โ in fact three:
one exposed for the ground
one exposed for the sky, but with the camera now tracking the sky to keep stars pinpoint
and a final sky panorama but with a specialized filter installed in front of the camera sensor to let through only the deep red light emitted by nebulas along the Milky Way
Rig for tracked panoramas with the MSM Nomad tracker
The image above shows my rig for taking tracked panoramas. The rectangular box is the little Nomad sky tracker from Move-Shoot-Move (MSM), here equipped with its accessory laser pointer to aid the “polar alignment” that is needed for this or any tracker to follow the turning sky properly.
A review of the MSM Nomad will be forthcoming (subscribe to my blog!). However, I’ve found it works very well, much better than MSM’s original Rotator tracker, which was entirely unreliable!
On top of the little Nomad is an Acratech pano head, so I can turn the camera by a specific angle between each pano frame, both horizontally from segment to segment, and vertically if needed when raising the camera from the ground pano to the sky pano.
The pano head is on a “V-Plate” sold by MSM and designed by the late, great nightscape photographer (and engineer by trade), Alyn Wallace. The V-Plate allows the camera to turn parallel to the horizon when on a tipped-over tracker. The entire rig is on a Benro 3-Axis tripod head (also sold by MSM, but widely available) that makes it easy to precisely aim the tracker for polar alignment and then hold it rock steady.
The H-Alpha Panorama rendered in monochrome
I’d taken many panos before using sets of untracked ground and tracked sky panoramas. New this night was the use a “narrowband” Hydrogen-Alpha filter to take a final pano that brings out the red nebulas. I used a filter from Astronomik that clips into the camera in front of the sensor. Such a filter has to be used on a camera that has been modified to be more sensitive to deep red light, as the Canon Ra shown below is (or was, as Canon no longer makes it).
While a modded camera brings out the nebulas, using an H-Alpha filter as well really shows them off. But using one is not easy!
Astronomik clip-in filters, the 12nm H-a on the right
The clip-in placement (unlike a filter in front of a lens) requires that the lens be refocused โ infinity focus now falls at the 3 to 6 metre point (the focus shift varies with the lens and focal length โ the wider the lens the greater the shift). With the image so dark and deep red, seeing even a bright star to manually focus on is a challenge.
Shifting the lens focus also changes the overall image size (called “focus breathing”) and often introduces more off-axis lens aberrations, again depending on the lens.
So, blending the H-Alpha pano (which I rendered out in monochrome, above) into the final stack is tough, requiring lots of manual alignment, image warping, BlendIf adjustments, and masking. This is where I added in the red colouration to taste. Careful here, as the “Saturation Police” patrolling social media will issue tickets if they judge you have exceeded their “speed limit.”
The complete panorama with Photoshop layers and adjustments
The final pano required a complex blend of image and adjustment layers, all applied non-destructively, so the many elements of the scene can be individually tweaked at any time.
The work was worth it, as the final pano records the deep red nebulas contrasting with the deep blue of a sky still lit partly by twilight, a magenta aurora to the north, and bands of green and yellow airglow, all above the earth tones of the Badlands. It is one of my favourite nightscape panoramas.
As a further note on software: For stitching panos I try to use Adobe Camera Raw first. It can work very well. But complex panos, especially taken with very wide lenses, often require the specialized program PTGui, which offers more choice of pano projection methods, cleaner stitching, and control of panorama framing and levelling.
Next up was Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.
A week later, with the waxing Moon beginning to appear in the western sky and the promise of clear nights, I headed south to the 49th parallel borderlands of the Milk River and Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, known as รรญsรญnai’pi to the Blackfoot First Nation who revere the site as sacred.
My plan was a framing of the galactic centre over the Milk River valley and distant Sweetgrass Hills in Montana, perhaps using the H-Alpha filter again. But clouds got in the way!
A 13-segment panorama of the landscape and sky just as the Sun sets over Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park (รรญsรญnai’pi) in Alberta.
When you are faced with a cloudy sky, you make use of it for a colourful sunset. I like shooting panoramas at such sites as they capture the grand sweep of the “big sky” and prairie landscape. Above is the scene at sunset.
A 14-segment panorama of the landscape and sky at sunset at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.
Above is the same scene a few minutes later as the Sun, though now set, still lights the high clouds with its red light, mixing with the blue sky to make purples. On the hill at right, a couple admires the sunset, adding a human scale to the vast skyscape.
This pano was with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 15mm and the camera in portrait orientation to capture as much of the sky and ground as possible in a single-row pano.
A 13-segment panorama of the sandstone landscape in blue-hour twilight at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.
I finished the evening with another panorama, but using a Canon RF70-200mm telephoto lens at 70mm to zoom in on the Sweetgrass Hills in the deepening twilight.
Rig for untracked panoramasPanorama head close-up
For these panoramas, exposures were short, so I didn’t need to track the sky. I used another combination of gear shown above. An Acratech ball head sits atop another style of panorama head that has adjustable click stops to make it easy to move the camera from segment to segment at set angles. When the lighting is changing by the second, it helps to be quick about shooting all the pano segments. Such pano heads are readily available on Amazon.
That pano head sits atop an Acratech levelling head (there are many similar units for sale), an essential addition that makes it easy to level the pano head so the camera turns parallel to the horizon. Any tilt will result in a panorama that waves up and down, likely requiring fussy warping or cropping to correct. Avoid that; get it right in-camera!
A single-image portrait of a sunset sky with the waxing two-day-old crescent Moon amid colourful clouds over the prairie.
As the sky lit up, I also shot the crescent Moon above the sunset clouds and prairie scene. While the clouds made for a fine sunset, they did not clear off, thwarting my Milky Way plans this night. I headed back to Milk River, to travel farther west the next day.
From Writing-on-Stone I drove along scenic Highways 501 and 5 to Waterton Lakes National Park.
A nightscape scene under a twilight “blue-hour” sky, on the Red Rock Canyon Parkway in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, looking west toward the sunset with the four-day-old crescent Moon.
After an initial cloudy night, I made use of the (mostly) clear night on June 10 to shoot twilight scenes with the now four-day-old crescent Moon in the evening sky. Here I wanted to play with another technique I had not used much before: focus stacking.
To keep exposures short (here to minimize the blurring effects of the constant wind at Waterton) you have to shoot at wide apertures (f/2 in this case). But that produces a very shallow depth of field, where only a small area of the image is in focus.
So I shot a series of six images, shifting the focus from near (for the foreground flowers) to far (for the mountains and sky). Photoshop has an Auto Blend function that will merge the images into one with everything in focus. I also shot separate images exposed for the bright sky, shooting a vertical panorama โ dubbed a “vertorama” โ moving the camera up from frame to frame.
I shot an additional short exposure just for the Moon, to prevent its disk from overexposing too much, as it did in the twilight sky images.
Twilight sky assembly and layers in Photoshop
So what looks like a simple snapshot of a twilight scene is actually a complex blend of focus-stacked ground images, panoramic sky images, and a single short image of the Moon replacing its otherwise overly bright disk. But the result better resembles what the eye saw, as single exposures often cannot record the range of brightness the eye can take in.
A nightscape scene under a moonlit sky, on the Red Rock Canyon Parkway in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, looking back along Pass Creek to the south, with the Milky Way rising at left.
About an hour later, from the same location, I shot the other way, toward the Milky Way rising over Vimy Peak, but the sky still lit blue by moonlight. This, too, is a blend of focus-stacked ground and panorama sky images. But the camera was on a fixed tripod for exposures no longer than 15 seconds. So I didn’t use the tracker.
And here the longer exposures do pick up more (colours, fainter stars, and brighter ground detail) than was visible to the eye. Revealing more than the eye can see is the essence and attraction of astrophotography.
A vertical panorama of the moonlit spring sky with the Big Dipper and Arcturus over the jagged outline of Anderson Peak at the Red Rock Canyon area of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.
Heading down the Red Rock Canyon Parkway, I set up the tracker rig for the darker sky, now that the Moon was nearly setting. I shot a vertical panorama, with two untracked ground segments and four tracked sky segments, to capture Arcturus and the Big Dipper over the iconic Anderson Peak.
Comparing without and with LENR โ Lots of coloured specks without LENR! Tap to zoom up.
For all the images at Waterton and Writing-on-Stone I used the 45-megapixel Canon R5 camera, great for high resolution, but prone to noise, especially colourful thermal hot pixels. (See my review here.)
For all the long exposures I turned on Long Exposure Noise Reduction, a feature most cameras have. LENR forces the camera to take a “dark frame,” a second exposure of equal length, but with the shutter closed. The camera subtracts the dark frame (which records only the hot pixels) from the previous light frame. The final image takes twice as long to appear, but is much cleaner, as I show above. So a two-minute exposure requires four minutes to complete.
While there are clever ways to eliminate hot pixels later in processing (using Photoshop’s Dust and Scratches filter), doing so can blur details. I’ve long found that doing it “in-camera” always produces better results.
The Milky Way rising over the peak of Mt. Blakiston, in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada.
With the Moon now down, I turned the camera the other direction toward Mt. Blakiston, to capture the star clouds of the summer Milky Way rising behind the mountain, in an example of a “deepscape,” a nightscape with a telephoto lens. This is another technique I’ve not used very often, as the opportunities require good location planning and timing, transparent skies, and a tracker. Apps like ThePhotographersEphemeris coupled with TPE3D, and PlanItPro can help.
Deepscapes frame landscape fragments below some notable deep-sky objects and starfields, in this case a region with several “Messier objects” โ nebulas and star clusters well-known to amateur astronomers.
This was a blend of one untracked and one tracked exposure, again on the Nomad. Taking more frames for stacking and noise reduction, while a common practice, was not practical here โ at this focal length of 70mm the sky was moving enough that the mismatch between sky and ground would make blending tough to do.
And the reality is that today’s AI-trained noise reduction software (see my test report here) is so good, image stacking is not as essential as it once was.
For many of the Waterton images I used the Canon RF28-70mm lens, usually wide open at f/2. For the image below I used the RF15-35mm lens at its maximum aperture of f/2.8. (See my test report on these lenses here.)
The stars and clouds trail across the sky over Cameron Lake in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, and Mt. Custer across the border in Glacier National Park in Montana.
On my final night in Waterton I drove the Akamina Parkway to Cameron Lake, located in extreme southwest Alberta on the borders with British Columbia and Montana. The glaciated peak to the south is Mt. Custer in Glacier National Park, Montana.
Again, I had hoped to get a deepscape of the photogenic starfields in Scorpius above Mt. Custer. But as is often the case at this site, clouds wafting over the Continental Divide defeated those plans. So Plan B was a set of long exposures of the clouds and stars trailing with the last light of the low Moon lighting parts of the scene. Chunks of ice still drift in the lake.
This is a blend of separate multi-minute exposures for the ground and sky, all at the slow ISO of just 100, and all untracked to purposely create the star trails, not avoid them.
So over a total of four nights at these wonderful World Heritage Sites, I was able to try out some new shooting techniques:
H-Alpha blending
Focus stacking
Deepscapes
As well as panoramas, both horizontal and vertical
Every nightscape outing is a learning process. And you have to be prepared to change plans as the clouds dictate. I didn’t get all the shots I had hoped to, but I still came away with images I was very pleased with.
I present a two-minute video set to music of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse.
In my previous blog Chasing the Cross Continental Eclipse I told the tale of my chase to see the total eclipse of the Sun. I ended up under mostly clear skies in the Eastern Townships of Quรฉbec, Canada, not Texas, my original destination.
Here I present the result of shooting with four cameras that afternoon, taking still images, time-lapses, and a 4K movie.
Be sure to watch in 4K!
The site worked out very well, as the lower Sun in eastern Canada lent itself to views framing the eclipse over a landscape below, in this case a very wavy lake. But I was lucky to have open water as other lakes in the area were still frozen.
My post-eclipse selfie at the Lac Brome site in Quebec for the April 8, 2024 total eclipse of the Sun.
As it was, a snow storm a few days earlier left lots of snow in the area to be included in my post-eclipse selfie.
This was only the third total solar eclipse I’ve seen from Canada, after February 26, 1979 from Manitoba, and August 1, 2008 from the air out of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. The next total eclipse from Canada passes over my home in Alberta. But it is not until August 22, 2044!
I had always planned to drive to the April 8, 2024 total eclipse of the Sun. But to where? I ended up on the other side of the continent than originally planned.
It is not often the path of the Moonโs shadow crosses your home country, let alone continent. Only once before in recent years, on August 21, 2017, did the narrow shadow path pass near enough to my home in Alberta to allow me to drive to a total eclipse. They almost always require flying.
Packed and ready to hit the highway for a long eclipse trip.
Yes, while I could drive to the April 8, 2024 eclipse, it was going to demand a much longer drive than in 2017. But driving allowed me to take a carload of telescope and camera gear. So that was the plan.
My destination was San Antonio, Texas. Thatโs where I had made a hotel booking more than a year earlier. The weather prospects in Texas were forecast to be best (at least according to the long-term averages) of any locations along the path in the U.S. or Canada. (I did not want to drive into Mexico.)
Where I was going! Where I ended up going!
On March 30, with some trepidation, I set out down I-15 heading south. I got as far as Great Falls, Montana, my stop for night one. But it was to be a move in the wrong direction.
The forecast for Eclipse Day as of March 30. Blue is bad; white is good!
The various long-range weather models were all agreeing, even 10 days in advance, that Texas (covered in blue above) was looking poor for eclipse day. But eastern Canada looked good! That was the exact opposite of what had been expected.
So on Easter Sunday, I turned around and headed north, crossing back into Canada at a lonely border post in southwest Saskatchewan.
I proceeded east along the TransCanada, Highway 1. I decided against a route across the northern U.S. and around the southern end of Lake Michigan, to avoid severe weather forecast for the middle of the U.S.
One of my daily Facebook travelogue posts with a beer of the day.
Along the way I posted my beer-du-jour travel reports, as above from Day 8, that day from within the shadow path at last!
Our 1979 eclipse group in 1979.The 1979 eclipse site in 2024.The February 26, 1979 eclipse.
I also stopped at the only total eclipse site, of the 16 I had seen previously, I have ever been able to re-visit. On February 26, 1979 I and a small band of friends from Edmonton viewed the mid-winter eclipse (the last one visible from southern Canada) from a median road (Firdale Road as it is now called) on the TransCanada Highway near Carberry, Manitoba. I found the spot again, where I saw (and shot with my Questar telescope) my first total eclipse of the Sun.
However, a day after entering Ontario, the bad weather caught up with me, forcing an extra night north of Lake Superior while the only highway across the region, Highway 17, was cleared of snow and re-opened at Wawa, the usual cross-Canada choke point.
My new destination (after abandoning the site in the Texas Hill Country) was to be southern Ontario.
The weather prediction as of April 5.Southern Quรฉbec looking good!
However, as eclipse day approached and the weather predictions became more precise, it was apparent that Ontario would also be under some cloud. Southern Quรฉbec was looking better. So the Eastern Townships became my new Plan A site! I was running out of time!
Using the TPE app to check the Sun’s location once on site, the day before the eclipse.
I arrived on site in Quรฉbec with only a day to spare to check out the location I had found by exploring Google maps.
With the Sun lower in the mid-afternoon sky in Quรฉbec compared to the high-noon Sun in Texas, I decided to shoot a wide-angle scene of the eclipse over a lake, preferably with open water, not ice! That required a site with public parking on an eastern lakeshore.
The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) app to check Sun angles.Zooming in with TPE app for my chosen Lac Brome site. .
The site I found, then checked out on April 7, was on Lac Brome. It proved ideal โ except for the thin cloud that was now predicted to drift through during the eclipse.
Sure enough, thatโs just what happened. The cloud detracted from the eclipse only in preventing long-exposure images recording the outermost streamers in the Sunโs atmosphere.
A wide-field view of the eclipse of the Sun, taking in the bright planets Jupiter (at top) and Venus (below) that were easily visible to the unaided eye during totality.
I could have sought out clearer skies by going even farther east, but I was in a crunch for time and hotel rooms! As it was I was able to get rooms everywhere I wanted and at normal โnon-eclipseโ rates!
A panorama of the lakeside parking area at Lac Brome prior to the eclipse. My RAV4 and camera array, pre-eclipse.I shot with 4 cameras at the car and one set up lakeside.
The Lac Brome site filled with cars during the day, with people from Quรฉbec and Ontario, but also from Alberta, and from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine โ at least those were the homes of the folks I enjoyed meeting on eclipse day.
Everyone had a great time and had a superb eclipse experience.
The total eclipse of the Sun over the waters of Lac Brome, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. The twilight colours come from sunlight from outside the shadow path.
The lunar shadow arrived from the southwest, from the direction of the Sun, appearing as a dark cloud racing toward us. At the end of the eclipse the sky brightened first in that same direction, as the trailing edge of the shadow shot up across the sky. The clouds helped make the shadow edge more visible.
A time-lapse of the arrival and departure of the lunar shadow, made of 1200 frames each 1 second apart.
I shot with five cameras, just as I had done in 2017, possible only because I drove.
The main rig was my faithful Astro-Physics Traveler, a 105mm refractor telescope the company owner designed for his personal use at the 1991 eclipse in Mexico.
My main eclipse rig, with a 60mm visual scope on the 105mm photo scope, on an equatorial tracking mount.
My Traveler, bought in 1992, has lived up to its name, having now been to six central solar eclipses: the annular eclipses of 1994 (Arizona) and 2023 (Utah), and the total eclipses of 1998 (Curaรงao), 2012 (Queensland, Australia), 2017 (Idaho), and now 2024 in Quรฉbec, Canada. I paired it with the wonderful matching AP400 mount, which I had only just brought back with me the month before from Australia, where it had spent the last two decades.
All the gear worked great. Unlike six months earlier for the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse in Utah, this time I remembered all the cables needed to have the telescope mount track the Sun.
I did mess up on a couple of settings (such as not framing the 4K movie camera as I should have โ in pre-eclipse excitement I just forgot to check my chart). But none of the errors were serious.
The eclipse in a blend of two exposures to display all the fiery pink prominences that were visible during totality around the lunar disk in one image, set against the bright inner corona of the Sun with the dark disk of the Moon in silhouette in front of the Sun.
Once started all my cameras, except for the one on the Traveler, ran unattended.
At this eclipse I was determined to get a good look at it through the small visual scope I had piggybacked onto the Traveler photo scope. While I had used a similar rig in 2017, I only thought to look through the visual scope 20 seconds before totality ended.
Not this year.
A telescopic close-up of the eclipsed Sun. Onto the central blend of images for totality I layered in single images of each of the diamond rings before and after totality. They are when the last or first burst of sunlight shines through lunar valleys. The first diamond ring is at top left, the last at bottom right, so time runs from left to right.
I got a great look at the eclipsed Sun, its corona structures, flaming pink prominences, and breakout of the red chromosphere layer just as totality ended. (You canโt easily see the chromosphere at the start of totality as it can be risky looking too soon through optics when the Sunโs blindingly bright photosphere is still in view.)
This is a composite showing the sequence of events surrounding totality, from just before totality (at upper left) to just after totality (at lower right), with totality in the middle. The contact images were taken 0.6 seconds apart.
And yet, as at all eclipses, I found the naked eye view the most compelling. The โblack holeโ Sun looked huge and unearthly. While I had binoculars handy, the same 12×36 image-stabilized binoculars I bring to most eclipses, I completely forgot to look though them, just as I forget at most eclipses!
This is a composite showing the complete sequence of the April 8, 2024 eclipse of the Sun, from first contact (at upper left) to last contact (at lower right), with totality at mid-eclipse in the middle.
I shot all the images with the Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm refractor at 630mm focal length and f/6, with the Canon R5 at ISO 100. The partial phases are 1/800 or 1/400 second exposures through a Kendrick/Baader solar filter.
Wanting to record the full sequence, I shot the partial phases until the bitter end. But post-eclipse, people came over and had a look through my scope (I think mine was the only telescope on site). We had a great time exchanging impressions. The hand-held phone camera photos people showed me looked fabulous!
I looked for fleeting shadow bands just before and after totality (I laid out a white sheet on the ground for the purpose) but saw none, a negative observation confirmed by a fellow eclipse chaser at the site.
Time-lapse movies of the second and third contact (start and end of totality) diamond rings, shot through the telescope with the Canon R5 in continuous burst mode for hundreds of frames each.
I did two live interviews for CBC Radio, for the Edmonton and Calgary stations, but not until after the eclipse ended. By the time I did those and finished packing away my carload of gear, it was 6:30 p.m., three hours after totality.
I was the last to leave the site, with fishermen now arriving for an eveningโs catch.
I was in that shadow as the Space Station flew over. Astronauts saw the elliptical shadow moving over eastern Canada.
The passage of the lunar shadow across the continent, showing where the clouds were. I was under the wispy clouds at upper right in Quรฉbec.
I faced no traffic jams heading back to the hotel at Ste. Helen-de-Bagot. I processed and posted one eclipse image that night. And I revised the price (down to $2.99 U.S.) and description of my How to Photograph the Solar Eclipses ebook, as now only the big processing chapter is of any value, post-eclipse. It continues to sell.
This is the waxing crescent Moon on April 10, 2024, two days after it eclipsed the Sun, and with it above the bright planet Jupiter, with it also near Uranus. Below the solar system worlds is the faint Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, visible here as a fuzzy star with a stubby tail..
On the long drive back to Alberta, with the pressure of having to make time now gone, I spent pleasant evenings stopping to see friends and family on the road home. So I didnโt start work on the complex blends and composite images I show here until I got home a week after the eclipse.
The happy eclipse chaser having bagged his game!
The 17-day-long drive was nearly 9,000 km over 100 hours behind the wheel. Was it worth it? Of course!
Would I do it again? Itโs a moot question as none of the upcoming eclipses allows for a cross-continent drive. Except perhaps in July 2028 in Australia. But I suspect just heading inland a day or two over the Great Dividing Range will be enough to get away from winter coastal cloud in New South Wales. (Sydney is in the path, but so is a cottage I rented last month near Coonabarabran for my superb March stay under the southern skies!)
The next total eclipse of the Sun visible from anywhere in Canada will be August 22, 2044. I wonโt have to drive anywhere, as it passes right over my house! But I will have to live that long to enjoy a eclipse from my own backyard.
I suspect this was my last chance to see โ and drive to โ a total eclipse in Canada.
Like all eclipses, seeing the October 14 annular eclipse of the Sun was not a certainty. As good luck and planning would have it, the sky and location could not have been better!
Annular eclipses of the Sun donโt present the spectacle of a total eclipse. Because the Moon is near its farthest point from Earth, its disk is not large enough to completely cover the Sun. At mid-eclipse, as I show below, a ring of sunlight (dubbed a โring of fireโ) remains, still too bright to view without a solar filter.
The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a single image captured at mid-eclipse, at 10:29 am MDT at the Ruby’s Inn Overlook on the rim of Bryce Canyon, Utah, a site well south of the centreline, with 3m03s of annularity.
While lacking the jaw-dropping beauty of a total, annular eclipses are rare and unique enough that every ardent skywatcher should make a point of seeing one.
Prior to October 14, I had seen only one, on May 10, 1994, from southeast Arizona, an event I captured on film of course back then.
My 1994 annular eclipse setup in ArizonaMy 2023 annular eclipse setup in Utah
A sunset annular on June 10, 2002 that I traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to see was mostly clouded out. The annular of May 20, 2012 traced a similar path across the U.S. Southwest as the 2023 eclipse. But work commitments at the science centre in Calgary kept me home for that one. A sunrise annular on June 10, 2021 in Northwestern Ontario was essentially out of reach due to COVID travel restrictions.
With no other annular eclipses within easy reach in North America until 2039 and 2046, this was my next, and perhaps last, opportunity to see one, unless I chose to travel the world.
Eclipse site and pathSite close upEclipse details at my final site
I had planned for several months to watch the annular eclipse from southern Utah, ideally from Bryce Canyon National Park, shown above. (Clicking on the images brings them up full screen.) I booked accommodations in January 2023, finding even then that popular hotels in the area were already sold out.
The final spot for the wide-angle composite shown below. The camera had to be next to that very fence post to frame the scene well.
The attraction was the landscape below the morning Sun, for a planned composite image of the eclipse over the hoodoos of Bryce. However, I had learned weeks earlier that traffic was going to be restricted to just park shuttle buses on eclipse day. Should Plan A not work out then Plan B was Kodachrome Basin, a state park nearby, which a park employee assured me would be open to cars well before sunrise on eclipse day.
Seen on I-15 past Salt Lake City. Eclipse ahead!
So I made my plans to drive south, taking with me a carload of telescope and camera gear, an array I would never be able to take to an overseas eclipse. The centrepiece was my venerable Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm (4-inch) refractor, a telescope created for the 1991 total eclipse in Mexico. Since I bought mine in 1992 Iโve used it for five central solar eclipses, including now two annulars. It’s in the 1994 and 2023 site images above.
A week before the eclipse (as above at left), the weather prospects for the entire southwest looked poor. It was to be clouds everywhere. I even considered Plan S โ Stay Home! And watch the 60% partial eclipse from Alberta where skies were to be clear.
But undaunted, six days before the eclipse, I headed south on Interstate 15, checking the weather each day, and seeking out Plan C sites in New Mexico or Texas south of the projected mass of clouds. I checked where accommodation could be had at the last minute.
At my stop in Richfield, Utah, four days before the eclipse, I had a crossroads turning point: either continue south to Bryce down US-89 (above), or head east on I-70, then south into New Mexico or Texas, with enough time to get there if needed.
But by now the weather prospects were turning around. By three days out, and with the forecasts now much more reliable, it looked like southern Utah would be in the clear. I continued with my original plan to Bryce. But where exactly?
TPE site overview with anglesTPE 3D showing Sun pathGoogle Earth 3D
I had looked at possible sites on Google Earth and with the Sun-angle planning apps I use (such as The Photographer’s Ephemeris, or TPE) and found one just outside the Park that I hoped would be accessible to drive into.
Upon arriving in the area three days early, the first priority was to inspect the site in person. It looked perfect! Almost too good to be true!
A panorama of the Ruby’s Inn site with the eclipse in progress. My wide-angle camera is at left by that fencepost.
The site, known as the Rubyโs Inn Overlook, provided a great view toward the eclipse with a stunning landscape below, including a river! (Well, it was actually an irrigation channel called the Tropic Ditch.) And I could park right next to my wide-angle landscape camera, to keep an eye on it over the five hours of shooting, while setting up the scope gear next to my car.
I stayed at the Bryce View Lodge on eclipse eve, a hotel just a few hundred metres from the site. So no long pre-dawn drive on eclipse morn. However, the gated site was not going to be open until 7 a.m. on eclipse day. And admission was $20 per car, a cash donation to the Bryce Canyon City school sports teams. Fine!
As it turned out, by the time I got on site and setup the priority wide-angle camera for the base-image sunrise shots at 7:30 a.m., the sky was too bright to polar align the telescope mount on Polaris, for accurate tracking of the Sun across the sky.
It turned out that was the least of my concerns.
My three eclipse cameras: the wide-angle, the one on the 105mm refractor telescope (with a smaller 60mm scope on top for visual views with a Herschel Solar Wedge), and one with a 100-400mm lens on the tripod.
As I unpacked the carload of scope gear at 8 a.m. I realized I had forgotten a crucial cable to connect the mount to the drive electronics. So the mount was not going to be able to track anyway!
So much for my plans for a time-lapse through the scope. I had to manually centre the Sun every minute or so. I took lots of photos, but gave up on any effort to take them at a regular cadence.ย But I had enough images for the singles and composites shown here.
This is a composite of the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse with a sequence of six images showing the Moon advancing across a sunspot, the largest one visible on the Sun that day. The images are placed for a photogenic spacing, with time running forward from lower left to upper right, to reflect the Sun’s motion up across the morning sky.
Of course, once I got home the first thing I did was look downstairs in my scope room. Sure enough there was the cable, mixed up with the similar electronics from another mount I have from the same company, as I had been testing both prior to the eclipse. So much for my checklists! Theyโre only good if they list every critical bit, and if you use them.
So that was one big user error.
You don’t want to see this at an eclipse!
The other was a camera error, in fact Error70! I had set my main telescope camera to take rapid bursts of images (at up to 20 frames per second) at the crucial second and third contacts when annularity began and ended. With the Moonโs rough limb tangent to the inside edge of the Sun, you see beads of light rapidly form and disappear at the contacts.
This is a composite of the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse at second contact. It illustrates the irregular edge of the Moon breaking up the rim of sunlight as the dark disk of the Moon became tangent to the inner edge of the Sun at second contact at the start of annularity. 15 exposures taken over 20 seconds at second contact are combined with a single exposure taken about 1.5 minutes later at mid-annularity.
The camera worked great at second contact, shooting 344 frames over 20 seconds. A composite of 15 of those frames is above, layered to exaggerate the rough lunar limb and its mountain peaks. A time-lapse from those frames is below.
A time-lapse of second contact from 344 frames over ~20 seconds.
And it appeared to be working at third contact three minutes later. Until I looked down and saw the dreaded error message. In checking the camera later, none of the third contact images had recorded to either memory card.
It is a known but intermittent bug in Canon firmware that can happen when the camera is not connected to a Canon lens (it was on a telescope it cannot communicate with). I saw the error once in testing. And I had a hard time reproducing it to take the screen shot above once I got home. But if something can go wrong โฆ!
This is a portrait of the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun, captured in a sequence of images taken from the rim of Bryce Canyon, Utah, from sunrise until nearly the end of the eclipse before noon local time. This is a composite blend of unfiltered exposures taken at sunrise for the landscape lit by the rising Sun, and for the dawn sky. Onto the base panorama of the ground and sky I layered in 66 filtered images of the Sun, as it rose into the morning sky, and with the Moon moving across its disk over nearly 3 hours, reaching mid-eclipse at about 10:29 local MDT at upper right. It then appears as a ring, or annulus of light for one frame.
Despite the errors both human and machine, I count eclipse day as successful, considering a week earlier prospects had looked so poor. As it was, apart from some thin but inconsequential cloud that drifted through before mid-eclipse, the sky was perfect.
As was the site. I enabled me to get the main shot I was after, the wide-angle composite, above. It’s a winner! And it accurately depicts the size of the Sun and its motion across the sky, albeit set into a twilight sky taken at sunrise.
As it had been 29 years since my last annular, I wasnโt sure what to expect. But the darkening of the sky and eerie level of sunlight, despite a blazing Sun in the day sky, were impressive. The morning just looked strange! It was a taste of the total to come.
Venus at its widest angle west of the Sun was easy to spot in the deep blue sky. I regret not thinking to shoot even a phone camera image of that sight.ย
Projecting the solar crescents with a made-on-the-spot pinhole projection sign.
I had pleasant chats with other folks at the site, and enjoyed showing them telescopic views though the smaller visual scope I had piggybacked on the main scope, one that was just for looking through.ย Plus folks shot phone pix of my camera screen.
The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a single image captured at second contact with the Moon tangent to the inside limb of the Sun, at 10:27 am MDT at the site I used.
But at the critical contacts, I was glued to that visual scope for the amazing sight of the horns of the crescent Sun rapidly wrapping around the Moon at second contact, then unwrapping at third contact.ย
The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a series of images captured at second contact with the Moon tangent to the inside limb of the Sun, at 10:27 am MDT at the site I used. The 7 frames here were selected from a set of 344 shot in high-speed continuous mode at 20 frames per second.
The breakup of the rim of sunlight into beads of light along the cratered and mountainous edge of the Moon was also impressive. I was not at the optimum site for seeing those beads, as the landscape dictated my choice of location. But those that I saw at each of the internal contacts were a fine bonus to a memorable morning.ย
This is a composite that records the sequence around mid-eclipse of the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun. This is a blend of 8 exposures each taken 2.25 minutes apart, about the minimum time to keep the disks separate and avoid them overlapping.
A third camera shooting a sequence with an untracked 400mm telephoto lens worked well. I used a subset of its images to create a still-image composite (above) and the full set for a time-lapse (below), with the position and motion of the Sun authentic, produced by the natural east-to-west motion of the sky. But against that you see the Moonโs orbital motion moving its dark disk down across the disk of the Sun.
A time-lapse from 300 frames taken at 4-second intervals with the sky’s motion carrying the Sun across the frame.
As soon as annularity ended, everyone else started to pack up and leave. For them the show was over. Understandably. On many total eclipse tours I’ve been on we’ve been on the road back to the hotel after totality and the requisite happy group shot.
Eclipse success! The trophy shot after everyone else had left.
But at this eclipse my shooting plan dictated that I stick it out. By the end of the eclipse I was the last one standing, alone to enjoy last contact and then lunch, killing time for any road congestion to diminish, as I had to head to another motel for the post-eclipse night, in nearby Panguitch.
I had a celebratory dinner and Moab-brewed beer that night at Cowboyโs, the best restaurant in Panguitch, sporting my Annular 2023 eclipse hat!
But the next day I started the drive north again, for the three-day trek back up I-15 to the border, then home.
Priority one upon getting home was to finish processing images, and to include them in a revised version of my ebook How to Photograph the Solar Eclipses. It is linked to above and here on the title. Images of some sample pages from the revised edition are in the slide show below.
Post-annular, the bookโs title remains the same, but I revised the pages in Chapter 4 on planning for the 2023 eclipse with pages on โlessons learned!โ And there were several!
I expanded Chapter 11 on processing to include tutorials on assembling annular eclipse composites, now that I actually have some!
Such as the composite of first- to last-contact telescopic close-ups below.
This is a composite of the various stages of the entire October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, from start (lower left) to end (upper right), with mid-eclipse at centre. So time runs forward from left to right, with the Suns positioned to reflect the approximate motion of the Sun in the morning sky when this eclipse occured at my site, with it rising higher through the progress of the eclipse. North is up in this image.
The new version of my ebook is 20 pages larger than the pre-annular edition.
An email has gone out from eJunkie to all buyers of the earlier-edition PDF to alert them to the new version, and with a download link. Apple Books readers should get a notice when they open the book on their Mac or iPad in the Books app that a new version is available.
I suspect that will be the last revision of my ebook before the big event โ the total eclipse of the Sun on April 8, 2024.
Hereโs wishing us all clear skies for that one! That eclipse will indeed require a drive to Texas. This time I’ll remember that damned cable!
For once I was able to watch a total eclipse of the Moon under clear skies from home. Good thing, as a snowstorm would have made travel a challenge.ย
On November 8, 2022 the Full Moon once again passed through the umbral shadow of the Earth, as it has done at six-month intervals for the last two years. The Moon turned deep red for almost an hour and a half.
This is the totally eclipsed Moon of November 8, 2022 set in the stars of Aries, with the planet Uranus nearby, visible as the greenish star about three Moon diameters away from the Moon at the 10 o’clock position.
This was to be the last total eclipse of the Moon visible from anywhere in the world until March 14, 2025.
However, in the days leading up to the eclipse weather prospects looked poor. The worse snowstorm โ indeed the first major snowstorm for my area โ was forecast for the day before the eclipse, November 7. Of course!ย
Weather prospects for eclipse time from the Astrospheric app.
For all the lunar eclipses in the last decade visible from my area, I have had to chase to find clear skies, perhaps a couple of hours away or a half dayโs drive away. I documented those expeditions in previous posts, the latest of which is here for the May 15, 2022 total eclipse. In all cases I was successful.ย
However, just once it would be nice to be able to stay home. The last โTLEโ I was able to watch from home was on December 21, 2010. It had been a long decade of lunar eclipse chasing!
But, it looked like another chase might be needed. Weather maps showed possible clear skies to the west and south of me on eclipse night. But cloud over me.
Other forecast models were a bit more optimistic.
The problem was with six inches of new snow having fallen and temperatures forecast to be in the minus 20s Celsius, any drive to a remote site was going to be unwise, especially at 3 am for the start of the eclipse in my time zone in Alberta.
I decided to โ indeed was more or less forced to โ stay put at home and hope for the best. So this was the โsnowbound eclipse!โ
Luckily, as the snowstorm receded east, clear skies followed, providing better conditions than I had expected. What a pleasure it was watching this eclipse from the comfort of home. While operating camera gear at -25ยฐ C was still a challenge, at least I could retreat inside to warm up.
A wide-angle view of the total eclipse of the Moon of November 8, 2022, with the red Moon at right amid the stars of the northern winter sky, plus with bright red Mars at top. Above and left of the Moon is the blue Pleiades star cluster, while below it and to the left is the larger Hyades cluster with reddish Aldebaran in Taurus. The stars of Orion are left of centre, including reddish Betelgeuse, while at far left are the two Dog Stars: Procyon, at top, in Canis Minor, and Sirius, at bottom, in Canis Major.
The view with the naked eye of the red Moon set in the winter sky was unforgettable. And the views though binoculars were, as always, the best for showing off the subtle colour gradations across the lunar disk.
A self-portrait of me observing the total eclipse of the Moon on November 8, 2022, on a very cold (-25ยฐ C) morning at 4 am.
As has been the tradition at the last few eclipses, I shot a souvenir selfie to show I was really there enjoying the eclipse.
A view of the aurora that appeared during the November 8, 2022 total eclipse of the Moon, as the sky darkened to reveal a show of Northern Lights on this very cold and icy night at 4 am.
A bonus was the appearance of some Northern Lights during totality. As the bright Moon dimmed during its passage into Earthโs umbral shadow, darkening the sky, the aurora began to appear to the north, opposite the eclipsed Moon.ย
Not a great display, but it was the first time I can recall seeing aurora during a lunar eclipse.ย
A parting shot of the now partially eclipsed Moon setting in the west down my driveway, early in the morning of November 8, 2022. With the Canon R6 and TTArtisan 21mm lens at f/2.8.
My parting view and photo was of the now partially eclipsed (and here overexposed) Moon emerging from the shadow and shining right down my rural snowbound driveway.
It was a perfect last look from home of a sight we wonโt see again for two and half years.
A selfie of the successful eclipse hunter having bagged his game, on the morning of November 19, 2021.
It’s been over 10 years since I’ve last had the luxury of observing an eclipse of the Moon from the comfort of home. Once again, a chase was needed.
During the post-midnight wee morning hours, the Moon was set to once again pass through the Earth’s shadow, this time presenting us with a deep partial eclipse, with 97% of the Full Moon’s disk immersed in the umbra and deep red.
We had another lunar eclipse in 2021, six lunar cycles earlier on May 26, an eclipse that was barely total and, for me, positioned low in the southwest at dawn. I chased that eclipse north to Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, to find clear skies on eclipse morning.
A composite “time-lapse” blend of the setting Full Moon entering the Earth’s umbral shadow on the morning of May 26, 2021.
Every lunar eclipse I’ve seen from Alberta since December 2010 I’ve had to chase to find clear skies. While the chases were all successful, this time I was hoping to stay home and enjoy the eclipse without a long drive to seek clear skies, and to then employ a telescope to shoot the Moon in close-up. In the days before the eclipse, the forecasts changed daily.
On the day before the eclipse, things looked bad, with high clouds forecast for home.
The Environment Canada forecast for eclipse time at 2 am Nov 19, as of the afternoon of Nov. 17.
It looked like a trip to north-central Alberta was warranted, perhaps to Wainwright. But rather than book a motel, I decided to wait to see if the forecast might improve. And sure enough it did.
The Environment Canada forecast for eclipse time at 2 am Nov 19, as of the morning of Nov. 18, eclipse day!
By the morning of eclipse day, prospect for clear skies from home looked better Or perhaps a short drive east would suffice. With luck!
But by the evening of the eclipse, clouds were not cooperating. The actual views from satellites showed lots of cloud over my area (as the view out the door confirmed!), and it didn’t look like the clouds were going away.
Satellite view eclipse evening, with my area in Alberta at centre.
But as the previous forecasts called for, clear skies were to be found to the north. So at 11:30 pm, with the eclipse starting in less than an hour, I packed up the car and headed north to as far as I could get โ and hopefully as far as I need to get โ to be assured of clear skies.
A selfie of the successful eclipse hunter observing the eclipse of the Moon, on the morning of November 19, 2021.
It worked! The eclipse was well underway as I made my way north, stopping to check its progress and the state of the clouds. As expected, about 90 minutes north I drove out from under the clouds you can see to the south in the photo above, where I had come from.
I chose a side road and pull off near Rowley, Alberta. I had enough time to set up three cameras, two on polar-aligned trackers to take longer, wide-field images of the Moon amid the stars, plus the static camera for the selfies.
The deep partial eclipse of the Moon of November 19, 2021, with the reddened Moon below the Pleiades star cluster, M45, in Taurus, the hallmark feature of this eclipse which at maximum at 2:03 am MST (about 8 minutes after this sequence was taken at 1:55 am MST) was 97% partial, so not quite total. This is a stack of 2 x 30-second exposures at ISO 3200 for the base sky, blended with 30s, 8s, 2s, and 0.6s exposures at ISO 800, all with the Canon EOS R6 camera on the William Optics RedCat astrograph at f/4.9, and on the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracker at the sidereal rate.
The red Moon below the blue Pleiades was the unique sight at this eclipse. It can only happen if an eclipse occurs in mid-November and that won’t happen for another 19 years, on November 18, 2040, in a total eclipse visible only from the eastern hemisphere.
After some mid-eclipse equipment woes โ a tracker deciding to come loose from the tripod, and a lens that refused to focus โ I also took some wider shots of the Moon among the stars of Taurus.
This is a stack of 2 x 30-second exposures at ISO 1600 for the base sky, blended with 10s, 4s, 1s, and 0.3s exposures at ISO 800, all with the Canon EOS Ra camera and Canon RF28-70mm lens at f/2.8 and on the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini tracker.
Despite writing an extensive blog on how to shoot this eclipse, it did prove to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. The portion of the Moon outside the umbra, even at mid-eclipse, remained very bright, and overexposed and flared in the frames with long enough shutter speeds to record the stars. A full total eclipse is easier to shoot!
This is a stack of 2 x 30-second exposures at ISO 3200 for the base sky, blended with 15s, 4s, 1s, and 0.25s exposures at ISO 400, all with the Canon EOS R6 camera and Canon RF28-70mm lens at 28mm and f/2.8 and on the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini tracker.
However, I can count this eclipse chase as a success. Of all the total (or near total in this case) lunar eclipses visible from my area of the world since 2001, I’ve seen them all. But almost all required a chase.
Will that be the case next year? We have two total lunar eclipses in 2022: on May 15 (with the Moon rising at eclipse time as seen from here in Alberta), and again six lunar cycles later on the morning of November 8, 2022, which is 12 lunar cycles after this most recent eclipse. We are in the middle of a nice run of 4 lunar eclipses, three total and one near-total.
On the night of November 18/19 eclipse fans across North America can enjoy the sight of the Moon turning deep red. Hereโs how to capture the scene.
Seeing and shooting this eclipse will demand staying up late or getting up very early. Thatโs the price to pay for an eclipse everyone on the continent can see.
Also, this is not a total eclipse of the Moon. But itโs the next best thing, a 97% partial eclipse โ almost total! So the main attraction โ a red Moon โ will still be front and centre.
CLICK ON AN IMAGE to bring it up full screen for closer inspection.
NOT QUITE TOTAL
At mid-eclipse 97% of the disk of the Full Moon will be within Earthโs dark umbral shadow, and should appear a bright red colour to the eye and even more so to the camera. A sliver of the southern edge of the Moon will remain outside the umbra and will appear bright white, like a southern polar cap on the Moon.
While some references will say the eclipse begins at 1:01 am EST, thatโs when the Moon first enters the outer lighter penumbral shadow. Nothing unusual can be seen at that point, as the darkening of the Moonโs disk by the penumbra is so slight, you wonโt notice any difference over the normally bright Full Moon.
The extent of the umbra and penumbra at the October 2004 total lunar eclipse.
It isnโt until the Moon begins to enter the umbra that you can see a dark bite being taken out of the edge of the Moon.
WHAT TO SEE
At mid-eclipse the Full Moon will look deep red or perhaps bright orange โ the colours can vary from eclipse to eclipse, depending on the clarity of the Earthโs atmosphere through which the sunlight is passing to light the Moon. The red is the colour of all the sunsets and sunrises going on around the Earth during the eclipse.
The total lunar eclipse of August 2007. At the November 18 eclipse the bottom edge of the Moon, as it did here, will be bright, but brighter than it appears here.
The unique aspect of this eclipse is that for the 15 to 30 minutes around mid-eclipse we might see some unusual colour gradations at the edge of the umbral shadow, from sunlight passing through Earthโs upper atmosphere and ozone layer. This can tint the shadow edge blue or even green.
The last lunar eclipse six months ago on the morning of May 26, 2021 (see my blog here) was visible during its total phase only from western North America, and then only just. However, this eclipse can be seen from coast to coast.
Only from the very easternmost points in North America does the Moon set with the eclipse in progress, but during the inconsequential penumbral phase. All of the umbral phase is visible from the Eastern Seaboard, though the last stages will be in progress with the Moon low in the west in the pre-dawn hours. But that positioning can make for photogenic sight.
The start, middle and end times of the umbral eclipse for Eastern and Pacific time zones. The background image is a simulation of the path of the November 18/19, 2021 eclipse when the Moon travels through the southern part of the umbra.
WHEN IS THE ECLIPSE?
The show really begins when the Moon begins to enter the umbra at 2:18 am EST (1:18 am CST, 12:18 am MST, 11:18 pm PST).
But note,these times are for the night of November 18/19. If you go out on the evening of November 19 expecting to see the eclipse, youโll be sadly disappointed as you will have missed it. Itโs the night before!
The eclipse effectively ends at 5:47 am EST (4:47 am CST, 3:47 am MST, 2:47 am PST) when the Moon leaves the umbra. That makes the eclipse 3 1/2 hours long, though the most photogenic part will be for the 15 to 30 minutes centred on mid-eclipse at 4:03 am EST (3:03 am CST, 2:03 am MST, 1:03 am PST).
The sky at mid-eclipse from my home on Alberta, Canada (51ยฐ N)
WHERE WILL THE MOON BE?
The post-midnight timing places the Moon at mid-eclipse high in the south to southwest for most of North America, just west (right) of the winter Milky Way and below the distinctive Pleiades star cluster.
The view from the West Coast.
The high altitude of the Moon (some 60ยบ to 70ยบ above the horizon) puts it well above haze and murk low in the sky, but makes it a challenge to capture in a frame that includes the landscape below for an eclipse nightscape.
ASTRONOMY 101: The high altitude of the Moon is a function of both the eclipse timing in the middle of the night and its place on the ecliptic. The Full Moon is always 180ยฐ away from the Sun. So it sits where the Sun was six months earlier, in this case back in May, when the high Sun was bringing us warmer and longer days. Winter lunar eclipses are always high; summer lunar eclipses are always low, the opposite of what the Sun does.
The view from the East Coast.
From eastern North America the Moon appears lower in the west at mid-eclipse, making it easier to frame above a landscape. For example from Boston the Moon is 30ยบ up, lending itself to nightscape scenes.
However, the sky will still be dark. To make use of the darkness to capture scenes which include the Milky Way, I suggest making the effort to travel away from urban light pollution to a dark sky site. That applies to all locations. Yes, that means a very long night!
PHOTO OPTIONS 1 โ CAMERA ON A FIXED TRIPOD
With just a camera on a tripod, if you are on the East Coast (I show Boston here) it will be possible to frame the eclipsed Moon above a landscape with a 24mm lens (assuming a full frame camera; a cropped frame camera will require a 16mm lens).
Framing the scene from the East Coast.
What exposure will be best will depend on the level of local light pollution at your site. But from a dark site, 30 seconds at ISO 1600 and f/2.8 should work well. But without tracking, you will see some star trailing at 30 seconds. Also try shorter exposures at a higher ISO.
Thereโs lots of time, so take lots of shots. Include some short shots of just the Moon to blend in later, as the exposures best for picking up the Milky Way will still overexpose the Moon, even when it is darkest at mid-eclipse.
Framing the scene from the West.
From western North America, including the landscape below will require wide lenses and a vertical format, with the Moon appearing quite small. But from a photogenic site, it might be worth the effort.
Total eclipse of the Moon, December 20/21, 2010, taken from home with 15mm lens at f/3.2 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600 for 1 minute single exposure, toward the end of totality.
Total eclipse of the Moon, December 20/21, 2010, taken from home with Canon 5D MKII and 24mm lens at f2.8 for stack of 4 x 2 minutes at ISO 800. Taken during totality..
However, as my images above from the December 2010 eclipse show, if thereโs any haze, the Moon could turn into a reddish blob.
You might be tempted to shoot with a long telephoto lens, but unless the camera is on a tracker, as below, the result will likely be a blurry mess. The sky moves enough during the long (over 1 second) exposures needed to pick up the reddened portion of the Moon that the image will smear when shot with long focal lengths. The solution is to use a sky tracker.
PHOTO OPTIONS 2 โ CAMERA ON A TRACKER
Placing the camera on a motorized tracker that has been polar aligned to follow the motion of the stars opens up many more possibilities.
Camera on a Star Adventurer tracker showing the field of a 24mm lens.
From a dark site, make use of the Moonโs position near the Milky Way to frame it and Orion and his fellow winter constellations. A 24mm lens will do the job nicely, in exposures up to 2 to 4 minutes long. But take short ones for just the Moon to layer in later.
Showing the field of a 50mm lens.
A 50mm lens (again assuming a full frame camera) frames the Moon with the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in Taurus.
Showing the field of an 85mm lens,
Switching to an 85mm lens frames the clusters more tightly and makes the Moonโs disk a little larger. For me, this is the best shot to go for at this eclipse, as it tells the story of the eclipse and its unique position near the two star clusters.
Showing the field of 200mm and 250mm lenses.
But going with a longer lens allows framing the red eclipsed Moon below the blue Pleiades cluster, a fine colour contrast. A 200mm lens will do the job nicely (or a 135mm on a cropped frame camera).
Or, as I show here, the popular William Optics RedCat with its 250mm focal length will also work well. But such a lens must be on a polar-aligned tracker to get sharp shots. Use the Sidereal rate drive speed to ensure the sharpest stars over the 1 to 4 minutes needed to record lots of stars.
Typical settings for tracker images, with an image of the January 2019 eclipse.
Take lots of exposures over a range of settings โ long to bring out the deep sky detail and shorter to preserve detail in the reddened lunar disk. These can be layered and blended later in Photoshop, or in the layer-based image editing program of your choice, such as Affinity Photo or ON1 Photo RAW.
PHOTO OPTIONS 3 โ THROUGH A TELESCOPE
While I think the tracked wide-field options are some of the best for this eclipse, many photographers will want frame-filling close-ups of the red Moon. While a telescope will do the job, unless it has motors to track the sky, your options are limited.
Phone on a simple Dobsonian reflector.
A phone clamped to the eyepiece of a telescope can capture the shrinking bright part of the eclipsed Moon as the Moon enters more deeply into the umbra. Exposures for the bright part of the Moon are short enough a motor drive on the telescope is not essential.
But if you havenโt shot the Moon with this gear before, eclipse night is not the time to learn. Practice on the Moon before the eclipse.
DSLR on a beginner refractor telescope showing the adapter.
For shooting with a DSLR camera through a telescope youโll need a special camera adapter nosepiece and T-ring for your camera. Again, if you donโt have the gear and the experience doing this, I would suggest not making the attempt at two in the morning on eclipse night!
DSLR on a beginner reflector with an often necessary Barlow lens.
For example, owners of typical beginner reflectors are often surprised to find their cameras wonโt even reach focus on their telescope. Many are simply not designed for photography. Adding a Barlow lens is required for the camera to reach focus, though without a drive, exposures will be limited to short (under 1/15s) shots of the bright part of the Moon.
An exposure composite of short and long exposures.
The challenge with this and all lunar eclipses is that the Moon presents a huge range of brightness. Short snapshots can capture the bright part of the Moon not in the umbra, but the dark umbral-shaded portion requires much longer exposures, usually over one second.
Your eye can see the whole scene (as depicted above) but the camera cannot, not in one exposure. This example is a โhigh dynamic rangeโ blend of several exposures.
A series of the September 27, 2015 total lunar eclipse to demonstrate an exposure sequence from partial to total phase.
Plus as the eclipse progresses, longer and longer exposures are needed to capture the sequence as the Moon is engulfed by more of the umbra.
After mid-eclipse, the exposures must get progressively shorter again in reverse order. So attempting to capture an entire sequence requires a lot of exposure adjustments.
TIP: Bracket a lot! Take lots of frames at each burst of images shot every minute, or however often you wish to capture the progress of the eclipse for a final set. Unlike total solar eclipses, lunar eclipses provide lots of time to take lots of images.
PHOTO OPTIONS 4 โ THROUGH A TRACKING TELESCOPE
If you want close-ups of the eclipsed red Moon, you will need to use a mount equipped with a tracking motor, such as an equatorial mount shown here. But for use with telephoto lenses and short telescopes, a polar-aligned sky tracker, as above, will work.
A small apo refractor on an equatorial mount with typical settings for mid-eclipse.
Exposures can now be several seconds long, and at a lower ISO speed for less noise, allowing the Moon to be captured in sharp detail and with great colour. Long exposures will even pick up stars near the Moon.
However, when shooting close-ups, use the Lunar drive rate (if your mount offers that choice) to follow the Moon itself, as it has a motion of its own against the background stars. Itโs that orbital motion that takes it from west to east (right to left) through the Earthโs shadow.
The fields of view and size of the Moon’s disk with typical telescope focal lengths.
Filling the camera frame with the Moon requires a surprising amount of focal length. The Moon appears big to our eyes, but is only 1/2ยบ across.
Even with 800mm of focal length, the Moon fills only a third of a full frame camera field. Using a cropped frame camera has the advantage of tightening the field of view, but it still takes 1200mm to 1500mm of focal length to fill the frame.
But I wouldnโt worry about doing so, as longer focal lengths typically also come with slower f-ratios, requiring longer exposure times or higher ISOs, both of which can blur detail.
A camera on an alt-azimuth GoTo Schmidt-Cassegrain.
For close-ups, a polar-aligned equatorial mount is best. But if your telescope is a GoTo telescope on an alt-azimuth mount (such as a Schmidt-Cassegrain shown here), you should be able to get good shots.
The field of view will slowly rotate during the eclipse, making it more difficult to later accurately assemble a series of shots documenting the entire sequence.
But any one shot should be fine, though it might be best to keep exposures shorter by using a higher ISO speed. As always, take lots of shots at different settings.
You wonโt be able to tell which is sharpest until you inspect them later at the computer.
TIP: People worry about exposures, but the flaw that ruins many eclipse shots is poor focus. Use Live View to focus carefully on the sharp edge of the bright part of the Moon. Or better yet, focus on a bright star nearby. Zoom up to 10x to make it easier to see when the star is in sharpest focus. It can be a good idea to refocus through the night as the changing temperature can shift the focus point of long lenses and telescopes. That might take moving the scope over to a bright star, which wonโt be possible if you need to preserve the framing for a composite.
PHOTO OPTIONS 5 โ HDR COMPOSITES
Using an equatorial mount tracking at the lunar rate keeps the Moon stationary. This opens up the possibility of taking a series of shots over the wide range of exposures needed to capture the Moon from bright to dark, to assemble later in processing. Take 5 to 7 shots in quick succession.
An HDR composite from the December 2010 eclipse.
High dynamic range software can blend the images, or use luminosity masks created by extension panels for Photoshop such as Lumenzia, TK8 or Raya Pro. Either technique can create a final image that looks like what your eye saw. The key is making sure all the images are aligned. HDR software likely won’t align them for you very well.
The January 2019 eclipse layered and blended in Photoshop.
Blending multiple exposures will also be needed to properly capture the eclipsed Moon below the Pleiades, similar to what I show here (and below) from the January 2019 eclipse when the Moon appeared near the Beehive star cluster.
PHOTO OPTIONS 6 โ ECLIPSE TRACK COMPOSITES
Another popular form of eclipse image (though also one rife for laughably inaccurate fakes) is capturing the entire path of the Moon across the sky over the duration of the eclipse from start to end.
The track of the September 2015 eclipse, accurately assembled to correct scale.
It can be done with a fixed camera on a tripod but requires a wide (14mm to 20mm) and properly framed lens, to capture the sequence as it actually appeared to proper scale, and not created by just pasting over-sized moons onto a sky to โsimulateโ the scene, usually badly. By the end of the day on November 19 the internet will be filled with such ugly fakes.
You could set the camera at one exposure setting (one best for when the Moon and sky are darkest at mid-eclipse) and let the camera run, shooting frames every 5 seconds or so. The result might work well as a time-lapse sequence, showing the bright sky darkening, then brightening again.
But chances are the frames taken at the start and end when the sky is lit by full moonlight will be blown out. It will still take some manual camera adjustments through the eclipse.
For a still-image composite, you should instead expose properly for the Moonโs disk at all times, a setting that will change every few minutes, then take a long exposure at mid-eclipse to pick up the stars and Milky Way. The short Moon shots are then blended into the base-layer sky image later in processing.
Framing the eclipse path for the start of the sequence. Framing the path so the Moon ends up at a desired location on the frame.
If the camera has been well-framed and was not moved over the 3.5 hours of the eclipse, the result is an accurate and authentic record of the Moonโs path and passage into the shadow, and not a faked atrocity!
But creating a real image requires a lot of work at the camera, and at the computer.
TIP: Shooting for composites is not work I would recommend attempting while also running other cameras. Focus on one type of image and get it right, rather than trying to do too many and doing them all poorly.
PHOTO OPTION 7 โ ECLIPSE SHADOW COMPOSITE
One of the most striking types of lunar eclipse images is a close-up composite showing the Moon passing through the Earthโs umbral shadow, with the arc of the shadow edge on the Moon defining the extent of the shadow, which is about three times larger than the Moon.
Such a composite can be re-created later by placing individual exposures accurately on a wider canvas, using screen shots from planetarium software as a template guide.
A composite of the Moon moving through the umbra.
But to create an image that is more accurate, it is possible to do it โin camera.โ Unlike in the film days, we donโt have to do it with multiple exposures onto one piece of film.
We take lots of separate frames with a telescope or lens wide enough to contain the entire path of the Moon through the umbra. A polar-aligned equatorial mount tracking at the sidereal rate is essential. That way the scope follows the stars, not the Moon, and so the Moon travels across the frame from right to left.
Framing for a shadow composite.
Start such a sequence with the Moon at lower right if you are framing just the path through the shadow. Use planetarium software (I used Starry Nightโข to create the star charts for this blog) to plan the framing for your camera, lens and site, so the Moon ends up in the middle of the frame at mid-eclipse. This is not a technique for the faint of heart!
A shadow-defining composite from January 2019, with the Moon near the Beehive cluster.
An interesting variation would be using a 200mm to 250mm lens to frame the Moonโs shadow passage below the Pleiades, to create an image as above. That will be unique. Again, an accurately aligned tracker turning at the sidereal rate will be essential.
Acquiring the frames for any composite takes constantly adjusting the exposure during the length of eclipse, which can try your patience and gear during the wee hours of the morning.
Iโll be happy just to get a good set of images at mid-eclipse to make a single composite of the red Moon below the Pleiades.
TIP: It could be cold and lenses can frost over. A battery-powered heater coil on the optics might be essential. And spare warm batteries.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 in a blend of 7 exposures from 1/30 second to 2 seconds, blended with luminosity masks in Photoshop.
PRACTICE!
To test your equipment and your skills at focusing, you can use the waning crescent Moon in the dawn hours on the mornings of October 29 to November 2 or, after New Moon on November 4, the waxing crescent Moon on the evenings of November 6 to 10. While the crescent Moon isnโt as bright as the Full Moon, it will be a good stand in for the bright part of the eclipsed Moon when it is deep in the umbra.ย
Even better, the dark part of the crescent Moon lit by Earthshine is a good stand-in for the part of the Moon in the umbra. Like the eclipsed Moon, the crescent Moonโs bright and dark parts canโt be captured in one exposure. So itโs a good test for the range of exposures youโll need for the eclipse, for practising changing settings on your camera, and for checking your tracking system.
The crescent Moon is also useful to test your manual focusing, though the sharp detail along the terminator (the line dividing the bright crescent from the earthlit dark part of the Moon) is much easier to focus on than the flat, low contrast Full Moon.
A selfie of me looking up at the total eclipse of the Moon on January 20, 2019, using binoculars to enjoy the view.
DONโT FORGET TO LOOK!
Amid all the effort needed to shoot this or any eclipse, lunar or solar, donโt forget to just look at it. No photo can ever quite capture the glowing nature of the eclipsed Moon set against the stars.
A selfie of the successful eclipse chaser bagging his trophy, the total lunar eclipse of January 20, 2019.
I wish you clear skies and good luck with your lunar eclipse photography. If you miss it, we have two more visible from North America next year, both total eclipses, on May 15/16 and November 8, 2022.
Spring is the season for Earthshine on the waxing Moon.
April 8 was the perfect night for capturing the waxing crescent Moon illuminated both by the Sun and by the Earth.
The phase was a 4-day-old Moon, old enough to be high in the sky, but young enough โ i.e. a thin enough crescent โ that its bright side didn’t wash out the dark side!
In the lead photo at top, and even in the single-exposure image below taken earlier in a brighter sky, you can see the night side of the Moon faintly glowing a deep blue, and brighter than the background twilight sky.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 in a single exposure when the Moon was still in the bright blue twilight. Even so, the faint Earthshine is just becoming visible. This is with the 105mm Traveler refractor and 2X AP Barlow lens for an effective focal length of 1200mm at f/12, and with the cropped-frame Canon 60Da at ISO 400, in a single 1/8-second exposure.
This, too, is from sunlight, but light that has bounced off the Earth first to then light up the night side of the Moon.
If you were standing on the lunar surface on the night side, the Sun would be below the horizon but your sky would contain a brilliant blue and almost Full Earth lighting your night, much as the Moon lights our Earthly nights. However, Earth is some 80 times brighter in the Moon’s sky than even the Full Moon is in our sky.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 in a blend of short and long exposures to bring out the faint Earthshine on the dark side of the Moon and deep blue twilight sky while retaining details in the bright sunlit crescent. This is with the 105mm Traveler refractor and 2X AP Barlow lens for an effective focal length of 1200mm at f/12, and with the cropped-frame Canon 60Da at ISO 400, in a blend of 7 exposures from 1/30 second to 2 seconds, blended with luminosity masks from ADP Pro3 extension panel in Photoshop.
Unlike the single image, the lead image, repeated just above, is a multi-exposure blend (using luminosity masks), to bring out the faint Earthshine and deep blue sky, while retaining details in the bright crescent.
Once the sky gets dark enough to see Earthshine well, no single exposure can record the full range in brightness on both the day and night sides of the Moon.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 with it below Mars (at top) and the star clusters, the Hyades (at left, with reddish Aldebaran) and Pleiades (at right) in Taurus, and set into the deep blue evening twilight. This is with the 135mm Canon telephoto at f/2.8 with the Canon 6D at ISO 400, in a blend of 7 exposures from 1/4 second to 8 seconds, blended with luminosity masks from ADP Pro3 extension panel in Photoshop, to prevent the Moon from being too overexposed while retaining the stars and blue sky. The camera was tracking the sky.
April 8 was a great night for lunar fans as the crescent Moon also appeared between the two bright star clusters in Taurus, the Hyades and Pleiades, and below reddish Mars.
It was a fine gathering of celestial sights, captured above with a telephoto lens.
This show the chart I used to plan the framing, created with StarryNightโข software and showing the field of the 135mm lens I used.
The chart also shows why spring is best for the waxing Moon. It is at this time of year that the ecliptic โ the green line โ swings highest into the evening sky, taking the Moon with it, placing it high in the west above obscuring haze.
That makes it easier to see and shoot the subtle Earthshine.ย And to see sharp details on the Moon.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 exposed for just the bright sunlit crescent, revealing details along the terminator. This is with the 105mm Traveler refractor and 2X AP Barlow lens for an effective focal length of 1200mm at f/12, and with the cropped-frame Canon 60Da at ISO 400, for a single exposure of 1/60 second. This is not a stack or mosaic.
The 4-day-old waxing crescent Moon on April 8, 2019 exposed for just the bright sunlit crescent, revealing details along the terminator. This is with the 105mm Traveler refractor and 2X AP Barlow lens for an effective focal length of 1200mm at f/12, and with the cropped-frame Canon 60Da at ISO 400, for a single exposure of 1/60 second. This is not a stack or mosaic.
After the sky got darker I shot the crescent Moon in a short exposure to capture just the bright crescent, included above in two versions โ plain and with labels attached marking the major features visible on a 4-day Moon.
If you missed “Earthshine night” this month, mark May 7 and 8 on your calendar for next month’s opportunities.
Three perfect nights in July provided opportunities to capture the night sky at popular sites in Banff National Park.
When the weather forecast in mid-July looked so promising I made an impromptu trip to Banff to shoot nightscapes and time-lapses under unusually clear skies. Clouds are often the norm in the mountains or, increasingly these days, forest fire smoke in late summer.
But from July 15 to 17 the skies could not have been clearer, except for the clouds that rolled in late on my last night, when I was happy to pack up and get some sleep.
My first priority was to shoot the marvellous close conjunction of the Moon and Venus on July 15. I did so from the Storm Mountain viewpoint on the Bow Valley Parkway, with a cooperative train also coming through the scene at the right time.
This was the view later with the Milky Way and Mars over Bow Valley and Storm Mountain.
The next night, July 16, was one of the most perfect I had ever seen in the Rockies. Crystal clear skies, calm winds, and great lake reflections made for a picture-perfect night at Bow Lake on the Icefields Parkway. Above is a 360ยฐ panorama shot toward the end of the night when the galactic centre of the Milky Way was over Bow Glacier.
Streaks of green airglow arc across the south, while to the north the sky is purple from a faint display of aurora.
This is a rare appearance of the unusual STEVE auroral arc on the night of July 16-17, 2018, with a relatively low Kp Index of only 2 to 3. While the auroral arc was visible the ISS made a bright pass heading east. This is a blend of a single 15-second exposure for the sky and ground, with seven 15-second exposures for the ISS, but masked to reveal just the ISS trail and its reflection in the water. The ISS shots were taken at 3-second intervals, thus the gaps. All with the Sigma 20mm Art lens at f/2 and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400. Taken from Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta.
The unusual STEVE auroral arc across the northern sky at Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta on the night of July 16-17, 2018. The more normal green auroral arc is lower across the northern horizon. But STEVE here appears more pink. The STEVE aurora was colourless to the eye but did show faint fast-moving rays, here blurred by the long exposure. They were moving east to west. The Big Dipper is at left. The lights are from Num-Ti-Jah Lodge. This is a single exposure for the sky and a mean-stacked blend of 3 exposures for the ground to smooth noise. All 15 seconds at f/2 with the Sigma 20mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400.
Earlier that night the usual auroral arc known as Steve put in an unexpected appearance. It was just a grey band to the eye, but the camera picked up Steve’s usual pink colours. Another photographer from the U.S. who showed up had no idea there was an aurora happening until I pointed it out.
My last night was at Herbert Lake, a small pond great for capturing reflections of the mountains around Lake Louise, and the Milky Way. Here, brilliant Mars, so photogenic this summer, also reflects in the still waters.
A blend of images to show the stars of the southern sky moving from east to west (left to right) over the peaks of the Continental Divide at Herbert Lake near Lake Louise, in Banff, Alberta. The main peak at left is Mount Temple. A single static image shows the Milky Way and stars at the end of the motion sequence. The star trails and Milky Way reflect in the calm waters of the small Lake Herbert this night on July 17, 2018. This is a stack of 100 images for the star trails, stacked with the Long Streak function of Advanced Stacker Plus actions, plus a single exposure taken a minute or so after the last star trail image. The star trail stack is dropped back a lot in brightness, plus they are blurred slightly, so as to not overwhelm the fixed sky image. The sky images are blended with a stack of 8 images for the ground, mean combined to smooth noise in the ground. All are 30 seconds at f/2.8 with the 24mm Sigma lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 3200. All were taken as part of a time-lapse sequence. Clouds moving in added the odd dark patches in the Milky Way that look like out of place dark nebulas. The reflected star trails are really there in the water and have not be copied, pasted and inverted from the sky image. They look irregular because of rippling in the water.
A blend of images to show the stars of the southern sky moving from east to west (left to right) over the Rocky Mountains at Bow Lake, in Banff, Alberta. The main peak at centre is Bow Peak. Crowfoot Glacier is at far left; Bow Glacier is at right below the Milky Way. A single static image shows the Milky Way and stars at the end of the motion sequence. The star trails and Milky Way reflect in the calm waters of Bow Lake this night on July 16, 2018, though they appear large and out of focus. This is a stack of 300 images for the star trails, stacked with the Ultrastreak function of Advanced Stacker Plus actions, plus a single exposure taken a minute or so after the last star trail image. The star trail stack is dropped back a lot in brightness, plus they are blurred slightly, so as to not overwhelm the fixed sky image. The sky images are blended with a stack of 8 images for the ground, mean combined to smooth noise in the ground. All are 30 seconds at f/2 with the 15mm Laowa lens and Sony a7III at ISO 3200. All were taken as part of a time-lapse sequence. Bands of airglow add the green streaks to the sky.
The stars trailing as they move east to west (left to right), ending with the Milky Way and Galactic Centre (right) over Storm Mountain and the Vermilion Pass area of the Continental Divide in Banff National Park, Alberta. Mars is the bright trail at left. Saturn is amid the Milky Way at right. This was July 15, 2018. The lights at left are from the Castle Mountain interchange at Highways 1 and 93. This is a stack of 8 exposures, mean combined to smooth noise, for the ground, plus 200 exposures for the star trails, and one exposure, untracked, for the fixed sky taken about a minute after the last star trail image. All 30 seconds at f/2.8 with the 24mm Sigma lens, and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400. The frames were taken as part of a time-lapse sequence. Dynamic Contrast filter from ON1 applied to the ground, and Soft and Airy filter from Luminar applied to the sky for a soft Orton effect.
At each site I shot time-lapses, and used those frames to have some fun with star trail stacking, showing the stars turning from east to west and reflected in the lake waters, and with a single still image taken at the end of the sequence layered in to show the untrailed sky and Milky Way.
But I also turned those frames into time-lapse movies, and incorporated them into a new music video, along with some favourite older clips reprocessed for this new video.
Banff by Night (4K) from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.
Enjoy! And do enlarge to full screen. The video is also in 4K resolution.
Clear skies!
โ Alan, August 2, 2018 / ยฉ 2018 Alan Dyer / AmazingSky.com
It was one of those mornings when the sky was full of wonder.
After days and nights of smoke from unfortunate fires burning not far away, including in my favourite national park of Waterton Lakes, the sky cleared enough this morning, September 12, to reveal some fine sights.
At 6 a.m. the waning gibbous Moon passed in front of the star Aldebaran in Taurus. It is performing many such occultations of Aldebaran this year, but most aren’t well seen from any one location. This one was ideal, right from my backyard.
The lead image is a “high dynamic range” stack of several exposures showing the waning Moon and star set in some high haze adding the sky colours.
The star winked out behind the Moon’s bright limb as the Moon advanced from right to left (west to east) against the background sky.
Aldebaran nearing the limb of the Moon.This shows a composite sequence, with images of the star taken every four minutes blended with a single image of the Moon. While it looks like the star is moving, it is really the Moon that is edging closer to Aldebaran.
The star reappeared from behind the dark limb of the Moon, but five minutes after sunrise, with the Moon in a bright blue sky. Still, the star stood out nicely in binoculars and in the telescope for this view.
Aldebaran off the dark limb of the Moon.Aldebaran is the point of light at right, just off the invisible edge of the Moon.
I shot stills and video, and compiled them into this short video.
Enlarge it to full screen to view it properly.
Meanwhile, over to the east the twilight sky was awash in planets.
The line of dawn planets, with labels.All the three inner terrestrial worlds were there: Venus, at top, Mercury below Regulus, and Mars lowest of the trio. Of course, a fourth terrestrial world is in the photo, too โ Earth!
Mercury was at its greatest western elongation this morning, placing it as far from the Sun and as high in the sky as it gets, with this autumn appearance the best of 2017 for a morning showing for Mercury. Even so, you can see how Mercury is always low and easy to miss. However, this morning it was obvious to the naked eye.
Mars and Mercury will be in close conjunction at dawn on the morning of September 16.
It was a fine morning to be up early and enjoy the solar system show.
โ Alan, September 12, 2017 / ยฉ 2017 Alan Dyer / amazingsky.com
I present the final cut of my eclipse music video, from the Teton Valley, Idaho.
I’ve edited my images and videos into a music video that I hope captures some of the awe and excitement of standing in the shadow of the Moon and gazing skyward at a total eclipse.
Totality over the Tetons from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.
The video can be viewed in up to 4K resolution. Music is by the Hollywood session group and movie soundtrack masters, Audiomachine. It is used under license.
Me at the 2017 total solar eclipse celebrating post-eclipse with four of the camera systems I used, for close-up stills through a telescope, for 4K video through a telephoto lens, and two wide-angle time-lapse DSLRs. A fifth camera used to take this image shot an HD video selfie.Never before have I been able to shoot a total eclipse with so many cameras to capture the scene from wide-angles to close-ups, in stills, time-lapses, and videos, including 4K. Details on the setup are in the caption for the video on Vimeo. Click through to Vimeo.
I scouted this site north of Driggs, Idaho two years earlier, in April 2015. It was perfect for me. I could easily set up lots of gear, it had a great sightline to the Grand Tetons, and a clear horizon for the twilight effects. And I had the site almost to myself. Observing with a crowd adds lots of energy and excitement, but also distraction and stress. I had five cameras to operate. It was an eclipse experience I’ll likely never duplicate.
If you missed this eclipse, you missed the event of a lifetime. Sorry. Plain and simple.
A composite of the 2017 eclipse with time running from left to right, depicting the onset of totality at left, then reappearance of the Sun at right. Taken with the 4-inch telescope shown above.If you saw the eclipse, and want to see more, then over the next few years you will have to travel far and wide, mostly to the southern hemisphere between now and 2024.
But on April 8, 2024 the umbral shadow of the Moon once again sweeps across North America, bringing a generous four minutes of totality to a narrow path from Mexico, across the U.S., and up into eastern Canada.
It will be the Great North American Eclipse. Seven years to go!
These are the Moons only insomniacs and night shift workers get to see. These are the waning Moons of morning.
For eight mornings I’ve been up at 4 a.m. each day to catch the early Moon and collect a series of images of its waning phases.
The result is above, a series that runs from right to left in time, from the 19-day-old waning gibbous Moon, to the 26-day-old thin crescent Moon.
I ordered them that way in the composite to reflect the direction the Moon moves across the sky. As it orbits Earth and wanes, the Moon moves from west to east, or right to left, in the sky from morning to morning, at least in the northern hemisphere.
A run of clear nights and mornings made the series possible. From Alberta, as dry as it is, too many cloudy nights make a consistent Moon phase series a challenge at best.
As it was I had to contend with smoke from forest fires in B.C. which reddened the Moon on the last few mornings, a tint I had to correct for the composite above. But here below, is what the Moon really looked like one morning.
The smoky orange Moon of July 17.
The last two Moons, at 25 and 26 days old (i.e. the number of days since the previous New Moon phase) exhibited the phenomenon known as Earthshine. You can see the night side of the Moon glowing gently with sunlight reflected first off the Earth.
Earthshine on the 25-day old Moon on July 20 at dawn.
Below, this was the Moon this morning, July 21, with it very low in the east amid the twilight sky.
Earthshine on the thin 26-day old Moon on July 21 at dawn.
This final morning was exceptional. The smoke had cleared off, and when I got up at 4 a.m. (reluctantly!) for the last shoot I was greeted with the best display of noctilucent clouds I had seen in many years. They covered the northeast and eastern skies in a rare “grand display.”
Noctilucent clouds with the Moon and Venus in the dawn sky, from southern Alberta, July 21, 2017.
The thin crescent Moon is just rising at right, with Venus bright as a “morning star” at far right. This was a sky certainly worth losing sleep over.
โ Alan, July 21, 2017 / ยฉ 2017 Alan Dyer / amazingsky.com
From the southern hemisphere the Moon appears “upside-down” and higher each night in the northern sky as it waxes from crescent to Full.
These are scenes from the last week as the Moon rose higher into the evening sky as seen from Australia.
A northerner familiar with the sky would look at these and think these are images of the waning Moon at dawn in the eastern sky.
The โupside-downโ waxing crescent Moon in the evening sky from Victoria, Australia, at Cape Conran, West Cape area, on the Gippsland Coast, at latitude 37ยฐ South. Earthshine lights the dark side of the Moon. This was March 31, 2017. The Moon lights a glitter path on the water. This is a single 1.3-second exposure at f/2 with the 85mm Rokinon lens, and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 400.
But no, these are of the waxing Moon (the phases from New to Full) with the Moon in the evening sky.
From the southern hemisphere the ecliptic โ the path of the planets โ and the path of the Moon arcs across the northern sky. So as the Moon waxes from New to Full phase it appears to the right of the Sun, which still sets in the west. The world still spins the same way down under!
So the Moon appears upside down and with the crescent phase the “wrong” way for us northerners.
A 240ยฐ panorama from 16 segments.
This panorama taken April 4 sweepsย from northwest to southeast, but looksย north at centre, to captureย the scene at sunset of the waxing 8-day gibbous Moon in the northern sky as seen from the southern hemisphere.
The angle between the Sun and Moon is just over 90ยฐ, shown here by the angle between the right-angle arms of the wharf, pointedย to the west at left, to the north at centre, and to the east at right.
The Sun has set just north of west, while the Moon sits 13ยฐ east of due north. The Earthโs shadow rises as the blue arc at far right to the east opposite the Sun.
A 240ยฐ panorama from 15 segments.
The next night, April 5, I shot this panorama from Philip Island south of Melbourne. Again, it shows the waxing gibbous Moon in the north far to the right of the setting Sun in the west (at left).
Getting used to the motion of the Sun and Moon across the northern sky, and the Moon appearing on the other side of the Sun than we are used to, is one of the challenges of getting to know the southern sky.
Things just don’t appear where nor move as you expect them to. But that’s one of the great delights of southern star gazing.
The most spectacular sight the universeย has to offer is coming to a sky near you this summer.ย
On August 21 the Moon will eclipse the Sun, totally!, along a path that crosses the continental USA from coast to coast. All the details of where to go are at the excellent website GreatAmericanEclipse.com.ย
If this will be your first total solar eclipse, you might want to just watch it. But many will want to photograph or video it. It can be easy to do, or it can be very complex, for those who are afterย ambitious composites and time-lapses.
To tell you how to shoot the eclipse, with all types of cameras, from cell phonesย to DSLRs, with all types of techniques, from simple to advanced, I’ve prepared a comprehensive ebook, How to Photograph the Solar Eclipse.
It is 295 pages of sage advice, gathered over 38 years ofย shooting 15 total solar eclipses around the world.
The book is filled with illustrations designed specifically for the 2017 eclipse โ where the Sun will be, how to frame the scene, what will be in the sky, how the shadow will move, where the diamond rings will be, what lenses to use, etc.
Here are a few sample pages:
I cover shooting with everything from wide-angle cameras for the entire scene, to close-ups with long telephotos and telescopes, both on tripods and on tracking mounts.
I cover all the details on exposures and camera settings, and on focusing and ensuring the sharpest images. Most bad eclipse pix are ruined not by poor exposure but poor focus and blurry images โ the Sun is moving!
A big chapter covers processing of eclipse images, again, from simple images to complex stacks and composites.
For example, I show how to produce a shot like this, from 2012, combining a short diamond ring image with a long-exposure image of the corona.
A final chapter covers “what can go wrong!” and how to avoid the common mistakes.
The ebook is available on the Apple iBooks Store for Mac and iOS devices. This version has the best interactivity (zoomable images), higher quality images (less compression), and easiest content navigation.
However, for non-Apple people and devices, the ebook can also be purchased directly from myย website as a downloadable PDF, which has embedded hyperlinks to external sites.
I think you’ll find the ebook to beย the most comprehensive guide to shooting solar eclipses you’ll find. It is up to date (as of last week!) and covers all the techniques for the digital age.
Many thanks, and clear skies on August 21, wherever you may be in the shadow of the Moon!
โ Alan, February 28, 2017 / ยฉ 2017 Alan Dyer / amazingsky.com
The crescent Moon rises into theย westernย evening sky as 2016 ends, while Venus shines bright, and Orion rises into the east.
Getting clear skies is a rare treat of late, but these are images from two such nights this week. On December 30, the thin waxing Moon appeared in the colourful twilight of a winter night. Despite the clouds and the Moon’s low altitude, the dark side of the Moon is plainly visible illuminated by Earthshine.
Venus is now brilliantย as an evening star in the southwest. Here is it over the old wood grain elevators at Mossleigh, Alberta, some of the few of these landmarks left standing on the prairies.
Fainter Mars shines above Venus and over the month of January, Venus will climb up to meet Mars by month’s end for a fine conjunction with the crescent Moon as well. Watch through January as Venus and Mars converge.
As the planets set into the southwest, Orion the Hunter rises into the east. Here it is over the Mossleigh elevators, illuminated by local lights.
The waning Moon shone near the bright star Aldebaran in the dawn sky.
This was a beautiful sight this morning, before dawn on July 29. The crescent Moon, its night side illuminated by Earthshine, shone just below the brightest star in Taurus.
We are currently in 3-year period when the Moon’s path is taking it near or in front of Aldebaran every month. However, most of these occultations or conjunctions are not well-timed for any particular location. And many involve the too-brilliant gibbous or full Moon.
But this morning the timing and Moon phase were perfect. From my longitude on Earth in Alberta, the Moon passed closest to the star just before the sky was getting too bright with dawn. Having them set against the deep blue twilight was perfect.
From farther east the Moon would not have appeared as close to Aldebaran as this before sunrise. From farther west the Moon and star would have appeared much lower in the sky at closest approach.
TECHNICAL:
For this image I shot 6 exposures, from 2 seconds for the Earthshine, twilight sky colour and stars, to 1/125th second for the bright crescent. I then stacked, aligned, and blended them together using luminosity masks โ masks that hide or reveal parts of the image based on the brightness of the scene. You can see them in the Photoshop screen shot – Click on the image to enlarge it.
How do you create these masks?
โข Turn off all the layers except the one you want to create a mask for.
โข Go to Channels and Command/Control Click on the RGB Channel.
โข That automatically selects all the highlights.
โข Go back to the image layer and then hit the Add Mask button down at the bottom of the Layers panel (the rectangle with the black dot in it).
โข Done. Repeat that for each image layer.
More traditional high dynamic range or “HDR” stacking left odd colour fringing artifacts and double images on the slowly moving Moon, despite applying what is called “de-ghosting” and despite using a mount tracking at the lunar rate. I tried merging the images withย HDR, but it didn’t work.
A nifty Photoshop action from the Astronomy Tools set by Noel Carboni added the diffraction spikes.
I shot all images with the 130mm Astro-Physics refractor at f/6 and the Canon 60Da camera at ISO 400.
On the night before the solstice Full Moon, the sky added a coloured halo around the Moon.
On June 19 I was at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta to teach a workshop on night photography, as one of the programs of the Park’s annual Wildflower Festival. The night proved hazy, but that added the attraction of an ice crystal halo around the Moon.
The lead image above is from Driftwood Beach, looking south across Middle Waterton Lake. Note Mars shining above the mountains at right.
Earlier in the night, at Red Rock Canyon, we watched the Moon rise in the twilight, then climb up the side of Mt. Blakiston. Here (below) it shines above the summit, surrounded by its hazy halo.
Lunar halo in a hazy sky at Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, with the Full Moon over Mt. Blakiston. This is a high-dynamic range stack of 6 exposures, to avoid the area around the Moon from blowing out too much while recorded detail in the dark foreground. All with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.
The workshop participants made the best of the night, shooting the moonlit scene down the canyon, toward the north and Cassiopeia.
Nightscape photographer at a workshop I was presenting, shooting Red Rock Canyon in the moonlight at Waterton Lakes National Park, June 19, 2016. Cassiopeia is in the sky to the north. This is a single exposure for 13 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 800 with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.
And as here, shooting from the canyon footbridge, toward the very photogenic Anderson Peak, with Jupiter just above the peak.
A workshop group of photographers at Red Rock Canyon at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, during the 2016 Wildflower Festival, June 19, 2016. Taken by the light of the Full Moon at solstice. Jupiter is the bright object behind Anderson Peak.
In keeping with the wildflower theme, I shot wild roses, Alberta’s provincial flower, in the moonlight, with Anderson Peak and stars in the distance.
Alberta wild roses in the moonlight with Anderson Peak in the background, at Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. Taken on Full Moon night June 19, 2016, at a workshop on nightscape imaging I was teaching as part of the Waterton Wildflower Festival. This is a single exposure at f/8 for 20 seconds at ISO 3200 with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.
While we might like dark skies when going to places like Waterton, there are many magical options for photography when the Moon is shining.
This is a video 37 years in the making, compiling images and videos I’ve shot of total solar eclipses since my first in 1979.
Though I’ve “sat out” on the last couple of total eclipses of the Sun in 2015 and 2016, I’m looking forward to once again standing in the shadow of the Moon in 2017 โ on August 21.
If you have not yet seen a total eclipse of the Sun, and you live in North America, next year is your chance to. It is the most spectacular and awe-inspiring event you can witness in nature.
I hope myย video montage relays some of the excitement of being there, as the Moon eclipses the Sun.
As always, click HD and enlarge to full screen.
My montage features images and movies shot in:
โขย Manitoba (1979)
โขย Chile (1994)
โขย Curaรงao (1998)
โขย Turkey (1999)
โข Zimbabwe (2001)
โข Australia (2002)
โขย Over Antarctica (2003)
โขย South Pacific near Pitcairn Island (2005)
โขย Libya (2006)
โขย Over Arctic Canada (2008)
โข South Pacific near the Cook Islands (2009)
โขย Australia (2012)
โขย Mid-Atlantic Ocean (2013)
Out of the 15 total solar eclipses I have been to, only the 1991 and 2010 eclipses that I did go to are not represented in the video, due to cloud. Though we did see much of the 1991 eclipse from Baja, clouds intervened part way through, thwarting my photo efforts.
And I only just missed the 2010 eclipse from Hikueru Atoll in the South Pacific as clouds came in moments before totality. Of course, it was clear following totality.
Cameras varied a lot over those years, from Kodachrome film with my old Nikon F, to digital SLRs; from 640×480 video with a Sony point-and-shoot camera, to HD with a DSLR.
I shot images through telescopes to capture the corona and prominences, and with wide-angle lenses to capture the landscape and lunar shadow. I rarely shot two eclipses the same way or with the same gear.
I hope you enjoy the video and will be inspired to see the August 21, 2017 eclipse. For more information about that eclipse, visit:
When visiting southern latitudes nothing disorients a northern hemisphere astronomer more than seeing our familiar Moon turned โthe wrong way!โ
With the Moon now dominating the night sky, my photo attention in Australia turns to it as my celestial subject.
Itโs wonderful to see the Moon as a crescent phase in the evening sky, but now flipped around so it looks like the Moon we see from home upย north when it is a waning crescent in the morning.
However,ย the lead image above actually shows the waxing crescent in the evening. It shines above the volcanic hills near Warrumbungles National Park, with the added silhouette of the dome of the Australian Astronomical Telescope, the largest optical telescope in Australia.
After a lifetime of seeing the Moon in its northerly orientation, seeing the austral Moon throws off your sense of time and direction. Are we looking west in the evening? Or east in the morning? The Moon just doesnโt make sense!
This is a two-exposure composite: a long exposure for the sky and ocean, and a short exposure for the disk of the Moon itself, to preserve some detail in the disk, specifically the mare areas to show the face of the Moon and not an overexposed white disk. Both with the 135mm telephoto and Canon 6D, from Woolgoolga, NSW.
Then thereโs the Full Moon. It rises in the east, as does the Sun. But like the Sun, the “down under Moon”ย moves from right to left across the northern, not southern sky. And the familiar โMan in the Moonโ figure is upside down, as seen above.
The photo above is from Friday night, and shows the Full Moon rising in the northeast over the Pacific Ocean.
The apogee Full Moon of April 22, 2016 rising over the Pacific Ocean and lighting the waters with a golden glitter path of reflected moonlight. I shot this from the Woolgoolga Headlands viewpoint, with the 135mm telephoto and Canon 6D. This is a high dynamic range stack of 5 exposures to compress the range in brightness. Even so, the Moon itself is still overexposed.
This “HDR”ย image above from earlier in the evening captures the golden glitter path of moonlight on the ocean waves. I photographed these Full Moon scenes from the Headlands viewpoint at Woolgoolga, a great spot for panoramic seascapes.
The Full Moon this night was the apogee Full Moon of 2016 โ the smallest and most distant Full Moon of the year, the opposite of a “supermoon.”
This is a high dynamic range stack of 7 exposures to preserve the range in brightness between the bright sky and Moon, and the dark ground in the dim twilight.
Earlier in the week I was inland, high on the New England Tablelands in New South Wales. This image shows the waxing gibbous Moon in the evening twilight over Ebor Falls on the Guy Fawkes River, one of the few waterfalls on the famed Waterfall Way in New Soith Wales that has water flowing year round.
The waning Moon joined Venus and Saturn on a cold winter dawn.
This was the scene this morning, January 6, as the waning crescent Moon met with Venus (bright, at centre) and Saturn (below and left of Venus) in the cold morning twilight.
The grouping appeared above the stars of Scorpius. Antares is just above the treetops.
The top image is with the Canon 60Da and 50mm lens.
The view below, with the 135mm telephoto and Canon 6D camera, is from a half hour earlier before the sky began to brighten with morning twilight.
The waning crescent Moon above Venus and Saturn (dimmer and below Venus) in the pre-dawn sky on January 6, 2016, taken from home on a cold winter morning at -20ยฐ C. This is a composite of a long exposure (8s) for the ground, a slightly shorter exposure (6s) for the sky, and shorter exposures for the Moon to avoid it being totally overexposed and to preserve the Earthshine. All with the 135mm lens and Canon 6D.
Venus passes very close to Saturn this weekend, with the two worlds appearing within a telescope field on the mornings of January 8 and 9. Get up early before sunrise and look southeast. Binoculars will provide a superb view.
Venus is hard to miss, but is now dropping lower each morning and will soon be gone from view as it ends its wonderful appearance as a morning star.
What a morning of sky sights, both before dawn and after sunrise.
December 7 โ This was the prime day I came to Arizona to enjoy, to be better assured of clear skies. As it turned out this will likely be the cloudiest day of the week here, but skies were clear enough for a fine view of a conjunction and an occultation. The comet was a bonus.
This is a stack of 5 exposures: 30, 8, 2, 0.5 and 1/8s, blended with luminosity masks as HDR would not blend images with such a large range of brightness and content, with the shortest exposures having almost no content execept for two bright objects! The camera was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker to follow the sky and keep the sky targets stationary and aligned, thus the blurred foreground. All with the 135mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 6D at ISO 400.
At 4 a.m. the waning crescent Moon rose accompanied by Venus, as the two worlds appeared in close conjunction in the pre-dawn sky. The view above captures the scene as the Moon and Venus rose over the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico. Comet Catalina is in this scene but barely visible.
This is a stack of 6 exposures: 30, 8, 2, 0.5, 1/8s and 1/30s, blended with luminosity masks as HDR would not blend images with such a large range of brightness and content, with the shortest exposures having almost no content execept for two bright objects! The camera was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker to follow the sky and keep the sky targets stationary and aligned. All with the 135mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 6D at ISO 800.
An hour or so later, with the Moon and Venus higher and with skies a little less cloudy, I was able to capture this scene, above, that included Comet Catalina, as a tiny blue dot next to Venus and the Moon. But if I hadnโt labeled it, you wouldnโt know it was there! The comet is proving to be less wonderful than anticipated, and any cloud dims the view even more.
I had hoped for a superb scene of a bright comet next to the two brightest objects in the night sky. But comets do what comets do โ surprise people with unexpected brightness (as Comet Lovejoy did last January) or with disappointing dimness … or by disappearing altogether, as Comet ISON did two years ago. I came here in December 2013, to this same location on the Arizona-New Mexico border, to catch ISON but no luck there at all!
This is a stack of 7 exposures from 10 seconds to 0.3 seconds at 1 stop intervals and blended with luminosity masks, to compress the huge range in brightness from the bright Moon and Venus, plus horizon sky, and the darker sky and sunrise clouds. All with the 35mm lens and Canon 6D.
Regardless of the comet, the conjunction of the Moon and Venus was stunning, about as good as such events get. Hereโs the view, above, an hour later again, with the eastern sky brightening in the dawn twilight. The only thing that would have made this event even more spectacular is if the Moon had actually covered up Venus in this twilight sky. Not quite.
The occultation of Venus by the waning crescent Moon in the daytime on Monday, December 7 at 9:30 am local time. This is just about 3 minutes before the actual occultation as the advancing Moon is about to cover Venus on the bright limb of the Moon. This is a frame from a 100-frame time lapse. Unfortunately, as I shot this on my trip to Arizona, I did not have more focal length than the 135mm and 1.4x extender used here.
For the occultation itself, we had to wait until well after sunrise for an event in the blue daytime sky, at 9:30 a.m. local time.
All of North America got to see this fairly rare occultation of Venus by the Moon, albeit in the daytime. Nevertheless, the two objects are so bright, this was visible to the unaided eye, even with some cloud about. In binoculars it was wonderful.
To shoot it, all I had was a telephoto lens, so the image scale doesnโt do the event justice. But the image above provides a good impression of the binocular view, with Venus as a brilliant jewel on the โringโ of the Moon.
The waning crescent Moon joined the planet trio this morning for a fine sight in the dawn.
This was the scene on November 6 with the waning crescent Moon just below Jupiter, and those two worlds just above the pairing of bright Venus with dim red Mars.
On Saturday, November 7, the waning Moon will sit beside Venus for an even more striking conjunction.
The waning crescent Moon below Jupiter, with that pair of worlds above the pairing of Venus (bright) and red Mars (just above Venus), all in the dawn sky in Leo, November 6, 2015. The stars of Leo are above, including Regulus. This is a composite of 4 exposures: 15 seconds for the ground (to bring out detail there), 4 seconds for the sky (short enough to prevent star trailing), and 1 and 1/4 seconds for the Moon itself to prevent it from being totally blown out as a bright blob. All with the Nikon D750 at ISO 2000 and Sigma 24mm Art lens at f/4.5. Taken from home.
This meeting of the Moon with the planet trio more or less concludes the superb series of dawn sky conjunctions we’ve been enjoying over the last month.
The planets remain in the morning sky but now go their own ways as Mars and Jupiter climb higher, while Venus drops lower.
Look east this week to see a wonderful conjunction of the waning Moon with three planets in the morning sky.
A great dance of the planets is about to begin in the dawn sky.
Venus, Mars and Jupiter are now all prominent in the eastern sky before sunrise, with Venus by far the brightest. Below it shines slightly dimmer Jupiter. But between those two brightest of planets shines dim red Mars.
The three planets are converging for a mutual close meeting in the third week of October, when from October 23 to 28 the trio of planets will appear within a binocular field of each other.
But this week, with the three planets still spread out along a line, the Moon joins the sceneย to start the planet dance. It shines near Venus on the morning of October 8 (as shown here). and then near Mars and Jupiter on October 9.
Look east between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. local time. All the planets are easy to see with unaided eye even in the city, but binoculars will frame the Moon-Venus pairing on October 8 and the Moon-Mars-Jupiter trio on October 9.
On the morning of September 10 the waning crescent Moon gathered near bright Venus and much dimmer but redder Mars (at left) in the dawn sky.
Venus and Mars have both moved into the morning sky, where they will begin a series of conjunctions with the Moon and with Jupiter, now just emerging from behind the Sun, over the next two months. This gathering is just the start of the dawn planet dance.
For the technically minded, this is a high-dynamic range stack of 5 exposures to accommodate the large range in brightness between the sky and Moon, and to preserve the earthshine on the “dark side of the Moon.”
I shot this with the Canon 6D and 135mm lens at f/2 and at ISO 800 in a set of 8, 4, 2, 1 and 0.5-second exposures, blended with HDR Pro in Photoshop using 32-bit mode of Adobe Camera Raw.
Look east at dawn on September 10 to see the first in a series of planet dances in the dawn sky.
Earlier this year in spring we had Venus and Jupiter blazing in the evening western sky. Now, after a time of retreat behind the Sun, they are emerging to repeat their show together but in the dawn sky.
However, Venus and Jupiter won’t be close together until the end of October. Until then, Venus and Jupiter slowly converge in the dawn sky, but now accompanied by dimmer but redder Mars.
On the morning of September 10, look east before sunrise to see the waning crescent Moon shining between Venus and Mars.ย Binoculars will frame the Moon and Venus, or the Moon and Mars, but not all three at once.
If your horizon and sky areย very clear you might spy Jupiter as well shining down below the trio in the bright morning twilight.
The real dawn dance begins in mid to lateย October, when first Mars, then Venus passes Jupiter, and all three worlds cluster in a tight triangle in the morning twilight.
The thin waxing Moon shines near Venus aboveย the colourful clouds of sunset.
Tonight, July 18, was the evening of a close conjunction of the crescent Moon near Venus in the evening sky. From my latitude at 50ยฐ North, the conjunction was going to be low, and atย riskย of clouds.
In this case, the clouds added to the scene as they lit up with sunset colours.
You can see the Moon and Venus at centre, while fainter Jupiter is at upper right, and perhaps not visible on screen at this scale.
The location is one I used last month for the Venus-Jupiter meeting, Little Fish Lake and Provincial Park, north of Drumheller. It’s a quiet spot. This Saturday night there were just three families there camping.
I shot this telephoto panorama with my red-sensitive Canon 60Da, which is designed to record red nebulas well, but does a nice job on punching up sunsets, too!
Alas, the clouds that painted the sky so nicely here, moved in as the worlds set lower. I wasn’t able to shoot them closer to the horizon amid the deep colours of a late twilight. But I’ll settle for this image.
Happy Canada Day! From one ofย the most scenic places in the country.
I spent a wonderful four days and nights last week at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, with near perfect weather conditions.
For one, the infamous winds of Waterton weren’t blowing, allowing me to shoot the iconic Prince of Wales Hotel reflected in the calm waters of Middle Waterton Lake at Driftwood Beach, with the waxing Moon above in the twilight sky.
Earlier in the evening, I was at the Maskinonge Overlook shooting some video for upcoming tutorials. At sunset I shot this image, below, of the Moon above the alpenglow of the last rays of sunlight.
The rising waxing gibbous Moon in the sunset sky over Maskinonge Wetlands at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, June 2015. The last rays of sunset are illuminating the peaks in alpen glow. This is an HDR stack of 3 exposures with the Canon 60Da and 16-35mm lens.
Happy Canada Day!
And don’t forget to look west for the ongoing Venus-Jupiter conjunction. I missed the best night last night, June 30 โ clouds! But here’s hoping for tonight.
Three planets now shine in the evening sky, includingย Saturn now at its best for 2015.
Look west in the early evening to sight brilliant Venus in the twilight, and slightly dimmer Jupiter above it. On the evening of Thursday, May 21, look for the waxing crescent Moon below Venus in a wide pairing of the night sky’s two brightest objects.
The Moon appears between Venus and Jupiter on Friday, May 22, and near Jupiter two nights later on Saturday, May 23.
Meanwhile over on the other side of the sky, Saturn is rising at sunset.
As the illustration shows, look southeast after sunset to see Saturn rising along with the stars of Scorpius. Saturn now outshines all the stars of Scorpius, including the red giant star Antares, shining below Saturn.
Saturn is at opposition this weekend, meaning Sun, Earth and Saturn are now lined up with Earth directly between the Sun and Saturn. That puts Saturn as close to us as it gets for 2015, and as bright as it gets.
Being opposite the Sun, Saturn is now rising in the southeast as the Sun sets in the northwest.
A nightscape of antique farm combines illuminated by starlight, with the Milky Way behind. The galactic centre area of Sagittarius and Scorpius lie to the south, with Saturn the brightest object at right. I shot this at the Visitor Centre at the Old Man on His Back Conservation Area in southwest Saskatchewan. The sky is a single 30-second exposure at f/2.8 with the 24mm lens and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 6400. The ground comes from a stack of 8 exposures to smooth noise, all part of a time-lapse/star trail sequence.
Here’s a shot of Saturn, Scorpius, and the Milky Way from early this morning, May 20, taken about 2:30 a.m. when Saturn and Scorpius lay due south. From the latitude of southern Saskatchewan where I am this week, Saturn and Scorpius graze the southern horizon, even in the middle of the night.
Incredible detail stands out along the terminator of the eight-day Moon.
This was the Moon on the evening of April 26, with the waxing Moonย eight days past New and one day past First Quarter Moon. It’s a great phase to explore the surface of the Moon.
In the north the arcs of the Alps and Apennine mountain ranges encircle Mare Imbrium.
In the south, craters pepper the Highlands in stark relief. Tonight, the Straight Wall was just beginning to catch the light of the rising Sun, creating a very sharp, straight shadow.
The regions along the terminator โ the boundary between light and dark โ at left are seeing the first sunlight in two weeks. To the right, on the more brightly lit portion of the near side of the Moon, the dark mare areas stand out in various shades of grey. Systems of rays splash out from bright, geologically fresh crater impacts.
On the technical side, this is a mosaic of two overlapping images, one for the northern and one for the southern hemisphere, taken through a Celestron C9.25 telescope at a focal length of 2300mm. I stitched them with Adobe Camera Raw’s new (as ofย last week’s update) ability to stitch images intoย a Raw-format panorama file.
The Moon meets Venus over a New Mexico pond in the heart of the Apache homelands.
This was the scene on Sunday evening, March 22, 2015, as the waxing crescent Moon appeared near Venus in one of the best conjunctions of the spring.
Earthshine lights the dark side of the Moon, while Mars also appears, below the Moon-Venus pair.
For these images I set up on the picturesque grounds of aย resort called the Inn of the Mountain Gods, near Ruidoso, New Mexico, a ski resort in winter and a cool mountain retreat in summer.
The resort, run by and on land owned by the Mescalero Apache, honours the spirits of the four sacred mountains on Apache land: Sierra Blanca, Guadalupe Mountains, Three Sisters Mountain and Oscura Mountain Peak.
As the resort brochure states, “These four mountains represent the direction of everyday life for our Apache people. Our grandparents would often speak of the place called White Mountain. It was there that the creator gave us life and it is a special place.”
I shot this image a little later in the evening when the sky was darker, stars were beginning to appear, and thin clouds added haloes around the waxing Moon and Venus. I think the clouds added a photogenic touch.
This weekend and early next week look for the Moon passing planets and star clusters in the evening sky.
The waxing Moon returns to the evening sky on Saturday night, March 21, a day and half after it eclipsed the Sun over the North Atlantic and Europe.
On Saturday,ย March 21 look for the thin crescent Moon very low in the west sitting just a degree (two Moon diameters) left of reddish and dim Mars.
The next night, Sunday, March 22, the Moon, now a wider crescent, shines three degrees (half a binocular field) left of brilliant Venus, for a beautiful close conjunction of the night sky’s two brightest objects. The photo ops abound!
This is one of the best Moon-Venus meet-ups of the current “evening star” apparition of Venus this winter and spring. Next month, for example, the Moon will sit six degrees away from Venus on April 21.
On Monday, March 23, the crescent Moon sits between Venus and its next destination, the bright star Aldebaran.
On Tuesday, March 24, the Moon, still a crescent, shines amid the stars of the Hyades star cluster near Aldebaran in Taurus, for a wonderful binocular scene. The more famous Pleiades star cluster is near by.
On all nights, you’ll seeย the night side of the Moon dimly illuminated by Earthshine, sunlight reflecting off the Earth and lighting up the dark side of the Moon.
Here’s a close-up of the March 24 scene, with the Moon in the V-shaped face of Taurus the bull that is marked by the widely scattered Hyades star cluster.
Please note: This diagram and the main chart above, are for western North America. From eastern North America, the Moon will be 2 to 4 Moon diameters lower in the sky for each of the dates indicated.
The dark and bright side of the Moon appear together in a portrait of the 5-day Moon.
This was the waxing crescent Moon on Friday, December 26 โ Boxing Day.
In this image you can see both the bright crescent directly lit by the Sun, and details in the dark side of the Moon lit only by sunlight reflected off Earth โ Earthshine.
I used a composite of 5 exposures from 8 seconds to 1/50 second to capture both sides of the Moon, with the images merged in Photoshop’s HDRPro module.
I shot the images through my TMB 92mm apo refractor using the Canon 60Da camera, on a very clear night in New Mexico.
Happy Boxing Day to all!
โ Alan, December 26, 2014 / ยฉ 2014 Alan Dyer / AmazingSky.comย
Ice crystals create a ring of light around the waxing Moon.
Clouds have moved in this week in New Mexico but the advancing weather system also brought an atmosphere filled with high altitude ice crystals.
Earlier this week they created a lunar halo โ a ring around the Moon. If you look closely you’ll see there are two rings. On the left and right sides (east and west) the halo splits into two. This is an effect of two haloes superimposed: the classic 22ยฐ halo and what’s called the “circumscribed halo” which changes shape and size depending on the altitude of the Sun or Moon.
In this case, the Moon was 62ยฐ up, and the appearance of the circumscribed halo exactly matches what computer simulations predict for this altitude.
The double star Beta Capricorni disappears in a wink behind the Earthlit edge of the Moon.
The evening of Wednesday, November 26 provided a bonus celestial event, the eclipse of a double star by the Moon.
The star is Beta Capricorni, also known as Dabih. I had a ringside seat Wednesday night as the waxing Moon hid the star in whatโs called an occultation.
Dabih is a wide double star, composed of a bright magnitude 3 main star, Beta1 Capricorni, and a fainter magnitude 6 companion, Beta 2 Capricorni. You can see both in the still image view at top. Their wide separation makes them easy to split in binoculars.
In reality, they are separated in space by an enormous gap of 21,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. By comparison, distant Pluto lies an average of just 40 times the Earth-Sun distance.
With such a wide separation Beta1 and Beta2 take an estimated 700,000 years to orbit each other.
Beta1 is a giant orange star 600 times more luminous than our own Sun and 35 times bigger. Beta2 is a blue subgiant 40 times more luminous that the Sun.
Adding to the complexity of the system, Beta2 is also a close double, while Beta1 is a tight triple star, making for a quintuple star system.
The movie below records each occultation, first of the fainter blue Beta2 star, then of the brighter Beta1 star.
Each occultation happens in an instant to the eye. However, stepping through the video shows that the brighter star took 4 video frames to dim, about 1/10th of a second. Whether this is real, due to the starโs giant size, or just an effect of the twinkling of the atmosphere, is questionable.
Technical notes:
The still photo is a โhigh dynamic rangeโ stack of 12 exposures from 4 seconds to 1/500th second, taken with the Canon 60Da camera at ISO 400, to capture the huge range in brightness, from the dark side of the Moon and stars, to the bright sunlit crescent. I used Photoshopโs HDR Pro module to stack the images and Adobe Camera Raw in 32-bit mode to do the tone-mapping, the process that compresses the brightness range into a final image.
I shot the video with the 60Da camera as well, setting it to ISO 6400, and using its video mode to record real-time video clips, both in HD 1920×1080 for the wide-field โestablishing shots,โ and in its unique 640×480 Movie Crop mode for the close-ups of the actual occultations. Those two clips appear as inset movies. I edited and processed the clips, plus added the titles, using Photoshop and its video capabilities.
All were shot from New Mexico with the TMB 92mm refractor at f/5.5.
The waxing crescent Moon shines amid the stars and deep blue twilight.
This was the scene last night, as the two-day-old Moon reappeared in the evening sky as a thin crescent.
The Moon looks full because most of the side facing us was brilliantly lit by Earthshine, sunlight reflected off the Earth and lighting the Moon. Here, only the thin crescent at right is directly lit by the Sun.
This was a particularly bright example of Earthshine, likely because so much of the northern part of the Earth is now covered with cloud and snow, making Earth even more reflective than it usually is.
To capture this scene through a telescope, I shot a set of high-dynamic-range exposures, from long to short, to capture the huge range in brightness from the dayside to the darkside of the Moon. The long exposure also captured the stars in the deep blue twilight of a clear New Mexico sky.
The Full Moon rises with the blue arc of Earth’s shadow over a New Mexico landscape.
I’m now in New Mexico for the winter, enjoying the clear skies and mild temperatures. After a few days of settling into the winter home, tonight was my first venture out to take advantage of the skies and shoot some images.
Tonight was Full Moon, a month after the total lunar eclipse. I drove out to the City of Rocks State Park to capture the moonrise over the unique desert landscape.
The main image above captures the Full Moon sitting amid the dark blue arc of Earth’s shadow rising in the east projected onto Earth’s atmosphere. It is rimmed above with a pink band, the “Belt of Venus,” caused by red sunlight still illuminating the high atmosphere. The image is a 5-section panorama.
In the clear air of New Mexico the shadow and Belt of Venus really stand out.
A few minutes later, with the Moon higher and sky darker, I trekked amid the unusual rock formations of the Park, to shoot the Moon amid an alien lunar landscape.
These two images are both “high dynamic range” stacks of 7 to 8 images, from short to long exposures, to capture the wide range of brightness in a twilight scene, from the dark foreground to the bright Moon.
I’m looking forward to a productive winter, photographing the sky and writing about photo techniques, rather than shovelling snow!
A desert highway leads off into anย open blue sky with theย waxing Moon.
This week I’m on the road heading south for the winter. Today, I was on US 89, one of the most spectacular roads on the continent, passing through southern Utah and northern Arizona.
At left are the Vermilion Cliffs in Arizona, contrasting with the blue sky and the quarter Moon rising in the east at right.
I took this view minutes earlier, from a viewpoint above the desert as US 89 descends from the Kaibab Plateau and the area around the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
I have not driven through this area of theย U.S. Southwest in 20 years. I’ll be back through here in spring, when I hope to shoot the April 4 total lunar eclipse from the Four Corners area.
A successfulย solarย eclipse! Always a great thing to celebrate!
Today, several hundred people, including students from the nearby elementary and high schools, enjoyed views of the Moon eclipsing the Sun fromย Jasper, Alberta. The eclipse event in Centennial Park was part of the Park’s annual Dark Sky Festival, held to celebrate the National Park’s status as a Dark Sky Preserve.
The photo above is a long 1/25 second exposure, though still taken through a solar filter, of the eclipsed Sunย dimmed by clouds. The longer exposure enabled me to pick up the clouds and iridescent colours around the Sun.
The photo below is a single exposure capturing the viewing through the many telescopes supplied by volunteers from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (Edmonton and Regina Centres), as well as capturingย the crescent Sun, seen here though a handheld solar filter.
Clouds came and went over the afternoon, but when they needed to be gone, clouds cleared off around the Sun for great views of the Moon hiding then revealing the giant sunspot that was the highlight of this eclipse.
The image below, which I shot through a small telescope at 1/8000th second through a filter, shows the big spot group about to be hidden by the advancing limb of the Moon.
This event was our last solar eclipse visible from most of Canada until the long-awaited “Great American Eclipse” of August 21, 2017, when the lunar umbral shadow will sweep across the United States, bringing a total eclipse to the U.S. and aย substantial partial eclipse to Canada.
The red eclipsed Moon shines over the Milk River, with Orion over the Sweetgrass Hills.
This was the scene at 4:45 this morning, October 8, from my observing site for the lunar eclipse, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta.
The eclipsed red Moon shines at far right over the Milk River and sandstone formations of Writing-on-Stone Park, home to ancient petroglyphs, and a sacred site to First Nations people.
At left are the Sweetgrass Hills across the border in Montana. Above shine the stars of Orion, withย his Dog Star Sirius below. Aboveย is Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades cluster.
The night was fairly clear for the hourย of totality, though with high haze fuzzing the stars and Moon. But considering the cloud I had driven 3 hours to escape I was happy.
Here I am in a 5:30 a.m. selfie by starlight and moonlight, with the clouds I had escaped now rolling in to cover the Moon as it began to emerge from Earth’s shadow.
No matter. I had capturedย what I had come for: the nightscape above (with a 14mm lens), and close-ups shot through this telescope gear, one of which I featured in myย previous post.
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 skyย 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 dawnย drive back home and an all-nighter chasing and shooting an eclipse.
‘Twas the night before the night before … an eclipse of the Moon.
This was the beautiful moonrise tonight, on Monday, October 6, two days โ by calendar date โ before the total lunar eclipse on October 8.
However, as theย eclipse occurs at pre-dawn on October 8, it’s really just a day and half to go before the Moon turns red as it passes through Earth’s shadow.
I shot these as the gibbous Moon, waxing toward Full, rose over the harvested field to the east of home. The setting Sun nicely lit the clouds which partly hide the Moon.
Earlier in the evening, I grabbed this shot as the Moon appeared and two white-tailed deer ran through the yard and out into the field below the rising Moon. Moon deer!
This is the sequence that will happen early on October 8, in a diagram courtesy Fred Espenak at EclipseWise.com. The times are for Mountain Daylight, my local time zone. The eclipse will be total from 4:25 to 5:24 a.m. MDT (6:25 to 7:24 a.m. EDT) when the Moon will be immersed in the umbral shadow and will appear deep red.
Use binoculars for the best view of the colours. An eclipsed Moon looks wonderful, like a glowing red globe lit from within, but it’s really lit by the red sunlight from all the sunsets and sunrises going on around the world at once.
The next total lunar eclipses are April 4, 2015 (again pre-dawn) and September 27, 2015 (at convenient early evening hours), both visible from North America.
The sky presents a panoramic show from Pyramid Island in Jasper National Park.
What a wonderful place to watch the stars. Last night I walked out to Pyramid Island in Jasper, via the historic boardwalk built in the 1930s. The site provides a panorama view around the lake and sky.
To the left is the “mainland.” Just left of centre the waxing gibbous Moon is setting over Pyramid Lake.
To the right of centre, the boardwalk leads out the small island, with Pyramid Mountain behind it.
To the right of the frame, a faint aurora glows to the northeast over the still waters of the lake.
This is a 360ยฐ panorama shot with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens in portrait orientation, with the segments stitched with PTGui software.
After shooting some panoramas I walked to the end of the island and shot this view looking north and northwest to Pyramid Mountain. The Big Dipper is to the right of the peak, and the aurora lights up the northern horizon at right.
As I shot these images, the night was absolutely quiet. Until the wolves began to howl at the north end of the lake, in mournful howls that echoed across the waters.
It was one of the most spine-chilling moments I’ve experienced in many years of shooting landscapes at night.
The autumn stars rise in trails over Athabasca Falls and Mt. Kerkeslin in Jasper National Park.
Last night was a good one for shooting nightscapes in Jasper. Skies cleared for a beautiful moonlit night, ideal for nightscape shooting.
I went to Athabasca Falls, a popular scenic attraction in Jasper but deserted after dark. I set up cameras at the usual overlook, shooting both a time-lapse and star trail set.
The main image above is the result of stacking 100 images in the star trail set. I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions from Star Circle Academy.
The foreground comes from one image, shot early in the sequence when the Moon lit more of the landscape. The Falls themselves remained in shadow, as I had expected from my lighting angle calculation and knowing the site.
The star trail imageย shows the autumn stars of Andromeda, Cassiopeia ad Perseus rising over Mt. Kerkeslin, the famous backdrop to Athabasca Falls on the Athabasca River, making its way to the Arctic Ocean
This image is a 4-segment panorama I shot earlier in the evening in the twilight, with the waxing Moon over the Athabasca River.
In the early 1800s, after explorer, astronomer, and fur trader David Thompson had to abandon his original route over the Rockies at Howse Pass, he came north, and followed the Athabasca and Whirlpool Rivers up over the Athabasca Pass, his new main route to the B.C. interior.
Aย much-publicized “super moon” rises over Mt. Rundle and Banff townsite.
I joined a small crowd of moon watchers at the Mt. Norquay viewpoint last night, Sunday,ย August 10, to view the rising of the super moon, the closest Full Moon of 2014.
Of course, no one could possibly detect that this moon was any bigger or brighter than any other moon. Nevertheless, everyone saw an impressive sight and went away happy.
I shot this image at the end of a 700-frame time-lapse, at about 10:15 p.m. This is an HDR “high-dynamic-range” stack of 8 exposures, from dark and underexposed (to capture the bright sky around the Moon) to bright and overexposed (to capture the foreground and dark trees).
Yes, I have cranked up the HDR effect a little, to beyond “natural.” But I think the result looks striking and brings out the structure in the clouds that hid the Moon at first.
Think what you will of “super moons,” they get people outside, looking up and marvelling. In this case, the PRย prompted a moonwatch party on a fine summer Sunday evening in one of the most scenic places on the planet.
The nearly Full Moon rises over Bow Lake, Banff then lights up the landscape.
Saturday night was a stunning night to shoot nightscapes in Banff. Skies were mostly clear, allowing the nearly Full Moon, a day before the much-hyped “SuperMoon,” to light the landscapes.
I began last night’s shoot at Bow Lake looking south toward the rising Moon over theย mountainย fireweed flowers.
Shooting the other way toward Bow Glacier reveals this moonlit scene, in a frame I shot as part of the set up for a time-lapse movie. I had three cameras going, each shooting about 350 frames. The computer is processing them as I type. Still-image “nightscapes” like these are so much easier!
When I arrived I thought I wouldn’t be surprised to find otherย time-lapsers present, at such a great spot on a perfect night.
Sure enough, Shane Black from Ohio was setting up for a twilight shoot with much the same gear I use โ a Dynamic Perception Stage Zero dolly system and eMotimo 2-axis motion controller. I was able to help Shane out by supplying a battery to power the rig when his was dying. Glad to help a fellow time-lapser! Good luck on the rest of your cross-country tour!ย
What a spectacular sunset tonight. The Sun is just going down in a blaze of red, while the waxing Moon shines in the deep blue twilight.
I grabbed the camera fast when I saw this happening out my front window, and raced out to the ripening wheat field across the road.
The top image is a 360ยฐ panorama of the sky, with the Sun at right and the Moon left of centre. The zenith is along the top of the image.
I used a 14mm lens in portrait mode to cover the scene from below the horizon to the zenith, taking 7 segments to sweep around the scene.
You can see the darkening of the sky at centre, 90ยฐ away from the Sun, due to natural polarization of the skylight.
I shot this sunset image a little earlier, whenย the Sun was higher but still deep red in the smoky haze that has marked the sky of late. It certainly gives the scene a divine appearance!
This is a 5-exposureย high-dynamic-range composite to capture the tonal range from bright sky to darker ground, the wheat field. I increased the contrast to bring out the cloud shadows โ crepuscular rays.
I boosted colour vibrancy but didn’t alter the actual colours โ it was a superb sky.
I used PTGui v10 to stitch the panorama at top and Photomatix Pro to stack and toneย the HDRย set. While Photoshop is wonderful it did not work for assembling either of these images.
The orange Full Moon โ a hyped “super moon” โ rises over a yellow field of canola.
What a colourful sky this was tonight โ the pink Belt of Venus twilight band above the blue shadow of the Earth, above the yellow ripening canola.
And the orange Full Moon embedded in our planet’s shadow.
The onslaught of publicity about super moons this week โ it seems we now have not one but several a year making them all a lot less super! โ does serve one purpose: it gets people out looking at the Moon they might otherwise take for granted.
Supermoon or not,ย this confluence of colours can occur any time the Full Moon rises. But if you aren’t outside watching you miss it.
The Full Moon rises over the sandstone formations of Red Rock Coulee, Alberta.
This was moonrise โ a super Moonrise โ 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 โ warm, dry and bug free, for 3 hours of moonlight time-lapse shooting, as well as taking these still images.
The Moon shines over the still waters of a prairieย lake.
On Saturday, July 5, the Moon put on a super show in the twilight sky. The Moon was exactly at first quarter phase 90ยฐ from the Sun, and it shoneย between Mars and the star Spica, for a tidy 3-world conjunction in the evening sky.
For these shots I was at one of my favourite places for nightscape shooting, Reesorย Lake in Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. These are still shots taken with one camera while two others were shootingย time lapses of the fall of night and the Moon movingย over the lake.
Later in the evening, some photogenic cirrus clouds movedย through the scene, nicely filling out the composition.
Here, you can see Mars to the right of the Moon and Spica to the left of the Moon. Below, on the water swim three white American pelicans that frequent the prairie lakes around here.
This was a perfect night. The anglers weren’t catching too much despite the fish leaping from the water every few seconds. But I managed to catch some nice photos and movies. It was a fine summer night to enjoy the sky.
The waxing crescent Moon shines over water at Bow Valley Provincial Park, Alberta.
What an excellent evening this was. On July 2 I was at a newly discovered spot, the Whitefish picnic area, in Bow Valley Provincial Park between Calgary and Canmore, Alberta.
I was there with colleagues doing a shoot for a promotional video for a project I’m involved with. But after the business shoot, I stuck around toย take my own shotsย for time-lapse movies and still images.
In the scene above the Moon is reflected in the still waters of Middle Lake in the Park. It’s a high dynamic range stack of seven exposures.
Here, a little earlier in the evening is the scene on the banks of the Bow River, with the Moon over the swiftly flowing waters of the glacier-fed Bow. Its waters nourish much of southern Alberta, making farming, industry and life possible in an otherwise dry,ย rain-shadow climate.
Though a year ago its flood-swollen waters were bringing disaster to many people along the Bow.
This evening I shot motion-control time-lapses by the Bow, using some new gear that slowly pans or turns cameras during a time-lapse shoot. This is me playing with the new eMotimo controller, while the Dynamic Perception dolly does its thing below.
The waning Moon and Venus rise together into the summer dawn.
This was the scene this morning, June 24, as the waning crescent Moon rose together in conjunction with Venus, into the dawn sky.
The morning could not have been more clear for a great view of them coming up over the distant hills in southern Alberta.
Pity there was not also some noctilucent clouds, but this morning there was no sign of them. Nor of any aurora through the night, despite promising signs of activity. But the morning show made up for their absence.
The waning Moon and Venus are together again on the morning of July 24, exactly a month from now.
May ends with a thin waxing Moon returning to the evening sky.
This was the scene on a fine Friday evening, May 30, as the two-day-old Moon returned to the western sky.
Mercury was not far away, and is in this frame but at far upper right. I wasn’t really framing the shot with Mercury in mind, but the Moon and clouds.
This frame is one of 440 I shot for a time-lapse sequence of the setting Moon and moving clouds. This is the result, nicely deflickered with LRTimelapse software, an essential tool for time-lapse processing.
How many times have I tried to shoot the Moon or Mercury low in the west and been foiled by cloud near the horizon? Notice the rain falling from the western cloud. Some place near Calgaryย was getting wet!
The Sun sets behind the desert landscape of the City of Rocks State Park, New Mexico.
This is another shot from two nights ago, May 2, taken during my evening shoot at New Mexico’s City of Rocks State Park. I took this right at sunset, and you might be able toย see the tiny crescent Moon in the twilight sky.
I used an ultra-wide 14mm lens and took a set of 7 exposures taken at 2/3rds stop intervals to capture the full range of brightness from brilliant Sun to shadowy landscape.
I stacked the exposures using Photoshop’s HDR Pro module and then “tone-mapped” the huge range of tonal values using Adobe Camera Raw in its 32 bit mode. This is an excellent way to process “HDR” images, compressing the huge range in brightness into one displayable image. I’ve used several HDR programs in the past but the new method of being able to use ACR, made available in recent updates to Photoshop CC, produces superb natural-looking results. I highlyย recommended it.
The thin waxing crescent Moon returned to the evening sky tonight, seen here in the deepening blue of a New Mexico evening.
I’m in Silver City, New Mexico (altitude 5900 feet) for a few days and nights, checking out places to spend next winter, under clearer and warmer skies than back home … and with rarely any snow to shovel.
This was the scene tonight, on the ranch road withย one of theย prime propertyย choices โ astronomers check real estate locations by day and night!
The crescent Moon is lit byย Earthshine as it sits amid the deep blue twilight. The stars of Taurus show up flanking the Moon, with the Hyades at left and Pleiades at right.
This image is a high-dynamic range stack of 6 exposures from 2 to 20 seconds, to capture the ground detail without blowing out the Moon. Lights from an approaching pickup truck nicely lit the trees duringย the final longest exposure.
For the technically minded, I stacked the images using Photoshop CC HDR Pro, then “tone-mapped” them using Adobe Camera Raw in 32 bit mode.
The sky was hazy all day and evening, from wind-blown dust common to the area. Fierce southerly winds were whipping up dust all day, which hung in the sky all evening as well.
The sunset was a golden yellow from all the dust in the air. Once it got dark the sky lacked the idealย desert transparency, muting the zodiacal light I saw last night from the Chiricahuas.
The eclipsed red Moon rises over the waters of Lake Macquarie on the east coast of Australia.
I was still in Australia for this eclipse and managed to see and shoot it, but only just!
I was on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where clouds and rain have been prevalent all week, in part caused by departing remnants of Cyclone Ita. The prospects for seeing this eclipse from the coast looked bleak indeed.
From eastern Australia, the Moon rose at sunset in mid-eclipse on our evening of April 15. I was with family in Australia and so we made an evening picnic of the event, joining a few others in the lakeside park who were there to also see the eclipsed Moon over Lake Macquarie, Australia’s largest salt water lake. I wanted to catch this eclipse over water, to see the effect above โ the “glitter path” from the Moon but one turned red by the eclipsed Moon.
As we were about to give up, I caught sight of the Moonย as it rose into breaks in the cloud, revealing the red Moon near Spica and Mars. We saw the last of totality and the early stages of the final partial eclipse. But later in the evening clouds rolled in again and the rain poured down. Indeed, I took myย last images of the eclipse with light rain falling and the cameras getting wet. This isn’t the first eclipse I’ve watched in the rain!
I shot with fixed cameras with 50mm and 135mm lenses. The top image is a 135mm telephoto shot, the other three are with the 50mm lens.
The waxing Moon shines amid twilight clouds from Australia.
While it looks like a waning morning Moon, this is the waxing evening Moon, inverted compared to northern hemisphere views. I shot this two evenings ago as the crescent Moon enters the evening sky.
With the return of the Moon to the sky, my dark sky observing sessions end. Next on the agenda is the total eclipse of the Full Moon on April 15. I hope to shoot that over the ocean from the Australian coast.
The Full Moon rises over the Pacific Ocean,ย exerting its pull on the ocean tides.
This was the scene last night, Monday, March 17, 2014 from the headlands at Woolgoolga, New South Wales, Australia. The views overlook the Pacific Ocean with the Full Moon rising. If the Moon looks a little odd, it’s because I took these images from “down under,” where the Moon appears ย upside down compared to what we northerners are familiar with.
However, no matter your hemisphere, the Moon exerts a tidal pull on the globe, which manifests itself most obviously as the twice-daily rise and fall of the ocean tides at shorelines like this. When I took these shots at moonrise, the tide was just past its minimum and was beginning to come in again, for a peak later that night with the Moon high in the north.
This image was from a few minutes earlier, with the Moon having just risen and looking a little more pale against the darkening twilight of the eastern horizon.
I’m in Australia for the next few weeks, to shoot lots of images of the southern autumn sky, skies permitting.
The thin waning Moon sits in the red clouds of sunrise on a winter morning.
This was the scene this morning, February 27, just before sunrise when I was able to catch the thin crescent Moon โ a waning Moon โ amid the sunrise clouds. The Moon just happened to appear in a clearer hole in the clouds, in a blue patch above the pinks and oranges of the clouds. They contrast with the cold blue snow below.
This was the scene at dawn on a cold winter morning as the waning Moon appeared near Venus.
The temperature was only -15ยฐ C, so rather pleasant compared to the -30ยฐ C it has been the last couple of mornings. On February 26, I awoke at 6 a.m. and ventured into the cold winter morning to shoot the conjunction of the crescent Moon beside Venus above the snowy landscape of southern Alberta.
This was not a particularly close conjunction, at least not for us in North America. But its location low on the southeast horizon made the scene attractive and photogenic.
I aimed the camera the other way, to the southwest, to catch bright Mars (at right near Spica in Virgo) and Saturn (at left in Libra) above the abandoned farmhouse. The stars of Scorpius shine at left.
So we had three planets visible at dawn this morning, a fine sight to start the winter day.
The waxing gibbous Moon rises over the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.
This was the stunning scene on Sunday night, December 15, as I drove out to Chiricahua National Monument south of Willcox, Arizona for some moonlight photography. I stopped on Highway 186 to catch the colourful twilight in the east with the Moon rising over the desert mountains.
This image, taken a few minutes later, shows a darker sky but with more prominent crepuscular rays โ shadows cast by distant clouds to the west where the Sun set. A photogenically placed windmill adds to the scene.
I love the contrast of Earth tones and twilight tints โ a very desert-like palette.
Following any total solar eclipse it’s traditional to look for the crescent Moon as it returns to the evening sky.
This was the view on November 6, three days after Sunday’s total solar eclipse when the waxing Moon was near Venus, with both high in our tropical sky as we finish our sail across the Atlantic. As I write this, we have just sighted the lights of Barbados off the port side as we round the north end of the island. It’s our first sighting of any other sign of civilization in two weeks, since we left the Canary Islands.
This view is from the next night, November 7, with the Moon higher and well above Venus, set amid the square rigged sails of the Star Flyer clipper ship.
It’s been a fabulous voyage across the Atlantic, with largely calm seas and beautiful weather on most days.
As we continue our sail across the Atlantic, our heading takes us southwest, directly toward the setting Sun.
This was the scene last night, a day out from the Canary Islands, as we set our course toward the eclipse intercept point. Our heading of roughly 245ยฐ takes us into the setting Sun each evening.
Weโre now often under sail alone, with engines off. As Columbus and all trans-Atlantic explorers did, weโre letting the northeast trade winds blow us across the ocean. Under their steady force, weโre making a good 8 to 9 knots, sufficient to get us to the eclipse path on the appointed day and time on November 3.
On that day the Moon, seen here as a waning crescent in yesterday morningโs sky amid our square-rigged sails on the 4-masted Star Flyer, will cover the Sun for 44 seconds.
Tonight, October 28, was a magical night. Many of the eclipse tour folks gathered on the aft deck with all the lights off to lie back on deck chairs and gaze up at the Milky Way, with us now hundreds of kilometres away from any other lights.
We had the Milky Way above, while below, the ocean in our wake was exploding with flashes of bioluminescence. The night was warm and of course windless because we’re travelling with the wind. It was an amazing experience.
This is about as subtle as an eclipse can be โ a partial penumbral eclipse of the Moon.
I was perfectly positioned to see this eclipse, such as it was. At mid-eclipse when I took this image, the Moon was due south and as high in the sky as it was going to get for the night.
My location was the hotel poolside bar and rooftop patio 10 floors up overlooking the harbour in Malaga, Spain.
Can you see the effect of the eclipse? Barely, perhaps. The Full Moon travelled through the top of the Earth’s penumbral shadow, creating a slight darkening of the lower portion of the Moon. I’ve boosted contrast a lot in processing yet the effect is still barely perceptible.
No matter. With luck, in two weeks time we’ll experience just the opposite โ the most spectacular eclipse the sky has to offer, a total eclipse of the Sun.
On the night of a penumbral eclipse, the Full Moon shines over the harbour on the Mediterranean at Malaga, Spain.
This was the view earlier tonight of the Full Moon from Spain, on the night of a partial penumbral eclipse.
The eclipse had not yet begun when I took this shot in the early evening. But even at mid eclipse at 1 a.m. local time, any darkening from the penumbral shadow would be very tough to photograph with anything but a very long telephoto or telescope, which I don’t have with me on this trip.
The penumbral eclipse of the Moon tonight is the complement of the total eclipse of the Sun in two weeks time. Lunar and solar eclipses usually occur in pairs. It is the total solar eclipse on November 3, half a lunar cycle from now, that is the attraction.
To see it, we leave Spain tomorrow and set sail across the Atlantic โ not in this century-old German sailing ship, the Eye of the Wind โ but in a modern ship the Star Flyer.
These were views seen from my airplane window earlier this evening as we descended into Madrid, Spain. The lighting, direction and timing were perfect for catching the crystal clear gibbous Moon shining in a beautifully clear sky (as it should be from this altitude) with a low Sun illuminating the clouds.
The view below, taken later after sunset, catches the Moon in a twilight sky, with the ย shadow of the Earth sharply defined as a dark blue band above the horizon.
In two days, on Friday October 18, the Moon passes through the outer part of Earth’s shadow, for a mild penumbral eclipse of the Moon.
I’ll be perfectly positioned in Spain to see it, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m off to chase not the shadow of the Earth but the shadow of the Moon, as it hits the Earth two weeks after the lunar eclipse. On November 3 worlds will align again for a total eclipse of the Sun across the Atlantic Ocean and central Africa. I’ll be on the ocean.
Internet connections willing, I’ll be blogging from shipboard about the eclipse and views of sea and sky as we cross the Atlantic from Spain to Barbados chasing moonshadows.
The waning Moon shines below Mars and beside the star Regulus in the dawn twilight.
This was the scene before sunrise this morning with the waning crescent Moon near Mars (above the Moon) and the star Regulus (left of the Moon) in Leo. Mars is getting the attention this week as Comet ISON flies near the planet and also appears near Mars in our earthly sky.
However, the comet is still very faint and needs a large telescope to see from Earth. It will be interesting to see if any of the Mars probes are able to image it, as ISON is still fainter than predicted and might be beyond their reach to detect. But if they do, they couldย help determine just how big ISON is and that in turn will tell us if it might survive its November 28 passage round the Sun to become a fine dawn object in December.
The Big Dipper swings behind the Hoodoos in the Red Deer River badlands on a moonlit night.
Last night I headed north to the Red Deer River valley to shoot a time-lapse over the river with the badland hills lit by the rising waning Moon. After finishing that I stopped at the popular Hoodoos tourist attraction on Highway 10 east of Drumheller. I had the place to myself at midnight, and the photo ops around the moonlit hoodoos were many.
These formations formย when harder capstone rock prevents the soft lower layers from eroding in the rain.
The Big Dipper was nicely positioned above the hills as it swings low across the northern horizon in autumn.
Here I aimed back toward the Moon, with its glare muted by high cloud, and backlighting the hoodoos. The stars of Perseus are rising at left.ย Unlike normal astrophotography, with nightscape work, and certainly time-lapse shooting, clouds can be a benefit.
This was a great spot to end an evening of nightscape shooting.
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 360ยฐ, 45,000-pixel-wide panorama, taken just as the Sun was setting almost due west and the Moon was rising 180ยฐ away in the east.
I took both panoramas with a Canon 5D MkII and 50mm Sigma lens, with the segments at a 30ยฐ spacing. That way I take 12 segments to cover a full 360ยฐ, 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 Harvest Moon rises with pink hues into the deep blue twilight over prairie fields.
This was the scene tonight, September 19, as the Full Moon rose into a clear eastern sky. The view was perfect, with a cloudless horizon (for a change!) and the Moon prominent and pink as it rose into the twilight sky.
The main image is from a few minutes after moonrise. The bottom image, with a dimmer Moon, is from just after moonrise.
In neither case did I punch up the Moon in contrast or colour separately from the sky to make it stand out more than it did in real life. And I certainly did not paste a telephoto lens shot of the Moon into a wide-angle scene. That’s faking it. This is real.
Both frames are from a 670-frame time-lapse sequence, from the Moon first peaking above the horizon to when it rose out of frame at top right. That’s still in processing!
The Harvest Full Moon sets into a prairie scene lit by the rising Sun.
This was the scene this morning, September 19, as the Full Moon set just after sunrise on a perfectly clear morning.
Clear, of course, but for the only clouds in the sky just where I wanted to shoot. However, in this case they did help make the scene, adding more colours to the western sky at dawn.
This was the true Harvest Moon, as moonset occurred only a couple of hours after the official moment of Full Moon. However, the setting moons of Wednesday night, September 18 and Thursday night, September 19 can both claim to also be the Harvest Moon, the Full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox.
I plan to shoot the Moon coming up again, 12 hours after it set for this photo, and right at sunset tonight.
Tonight, the waxing crescent Moon passed by Venus for a close conjunction in the evening twilight.
At this time of year from my latitude of 51ยฐ north, the evening ecliptic always swings low across the southwest. So any fall evening planets, and the Moon, appear low on the horizon and set early.
That was the case tonight, for the close passage of the Moon past Venus (at right). However, their altitude allowed me to capture them and the prairie horizon in the same telephoto lens field.
It was certainly a beautiful sight over the harvested prairie fields, on what feels like an autumn night, though officially it is still summer.
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!
Saturday night was one of the finest nights for nightscape shooting I’ve had in a long time. I started with shots of the waxing Moon setting overย Reesor Lake, one of the lakes in Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, on the Alberta side. Water from this lake drains into the Milk River and then into the Missouri, and Gulf of Mexico. It one of the few bodies of water in Alberta that feed the Mississippi watershed, with the Cypress Hills acting as a continental divide.
I set up two cameras, each shooting a twilight-to-night time-lapse sequence showing the Moon setting behind the hills and the stars coming out. I filled up one card with 600 images. Luckily, the other camera still had space left for what was still to come later that night. One sight was the beautiful auroral arc I featured in my previous blog post. I’ll have more tomorrow, of the Milky Way over the lake.
It had rained earlier in the day so the air was humid. Mist covered the lake as night fell. In the scene above, a small fleet of American pelicans also glide by.
Watching the peaceful scene while monitoring the cameras clicking away provided one of those magical moments that makes doing this photography worthwhile, regardless of the results. The mist was swirling, the stars were coming out, I put on some music on the iPhone and on came a Chopin nocturne. Perfect.
Here is the much hyped Supermoon of 2013 rising into a twilight sky on the wet Alberta prairies.
A clear night for a change, with no storms about. Though one rolled through earlier today. We don’t need any more rain!ย Thankfully I am high and dry on the Alberta prairie but many friends to the west are not so lucky and have been flooded out, evacuated or have been camping in their homes with power and heat off. Calgary has largely come to a standstill, with the main pastime being watching the rivers rise and fall.
Tonight, after two days of destruction from horrific floods, at least we in southern Alberta were able to enjoy a clear night and the sight of the wonderful solstice Moon rising. This is the closest Full Moon of 2013 and has received an inordinate amount of PR as the “supermoon.”
It certainly did look fine tonight, though in truth no one could ever tell the difference between this “supermoon” and any normal Full Moon.
But perhaps this one is a little special, reminding us that the sky brings beauty as well as destruction.
The works of man crumble and return to the Earth under the timeless turning of the stars.
OK, a bit of purply prose I suppose, but I think the photo turned out rather neat. This is a favourite spot of mine, at a decaying old farmyard down the road from where I live.
It’s one of many such homesteads in the area, built by the CPR railway on land they were granted as part of their enticement to build “the National Dream” rail line across Canada in the 1880s. The CPR then built houses for the pioneer settlers who came by rail to be dropped off across the Prairies, often with little more in hand than a shovel and a sack of potatoes to get them going. Eventually, the railway would make money shipping the pioneers’ wheat and cattle out.
This old homestead was once part of a community in the area called Ouletteville, a town I assume settled by French Canadians or immigrants from France, but long since gone except for its cemetery up the road.
Now, as the house and farm buildings crumble back to dust, they make great subjects for a little low-effort nightscape shooting, especially when trying out new techniques and gear. I don’t have to invest a lot of time travelling, yet the place is photogenic enough to yield some nice shots.
This night I was testing some new panorama shooting techniques, using a fish-eye lens to shoot an all-encompassing 360ยฐ view. But this shot was one of several I took at the end of the night, using a more conventional 24mm lens. It’s a stack of 4 exposures: one short 50-second shot at ISO 800 for the initial stars, and then three 10-minute shots at a ISO 100 for the long star trails.
I shot this Monday evening, April 22, on the first decent night in nearly three weeks in what has been an awful spring. At least most of the snow has gone. The waxing gibbous Moon provided the off-camera illumination.
On Sunday night, March 17, the waxing Moon came very close to Jupiter and the Hyades star cluster for one of the best conjunctions of the year.
This was certainly a night to remember. Minutes after I took the images for this shot, I took the frames for the Comet over the VLA image in the previous post. Here, I caught the Moon shining just below Jupiter (you can see a couple of its moons as well) and just above the Hyades star cluster and the bright yellow star Aldebaran at the bottom of the frame. All are set in the deep blue of twilight.
This is a high dynamic range (HDR) stack of seven exposures ranging from 6 seconds to 1/13 second, to capture the huge range in brightness from the sunlit Moon to the faint stars. Even so, the daylit side of the Moon remains overexposed. But the “dark side of the Moon” lit by Earthshine shows up well. A 135mm telephoto frames the field much as binoculars would show it.
This night recalled a similar evening on April 10, 1997, when Comet Hale-Bopp appeared low in the northwest, much as PANSTARRS is now, and the Moon actually passed in front of Aldebaran. An aurora display also broke loose that night, but not so last night โ they are unlikely from New Mexico, though some northern lights were seen the night before from as far south as Colorado.
This was the scene tonight, March 13, as Comet PANSTARRS set over the mountains in deep twilight, with the waxing Moon hanging overhead.
The small comet sits low in the orange glow of twilight, where the Moon was last nightwhen it was down beside the comet. Tonight, a day later, the Moon appeared much higher in the sky as it waxes toward first quarter Moon in another few days. Tonight it was a crescent with most of the dark part of the lunar disk lit by Earthshine. I took this shot just before the comet set behind the mountains, to get the sky as dark as possible and the exposure longer to bring out some stars in the deepening blue of twilight.
I took this from the Painted Pony Resort in New Mexico where about 15 of us are gathered for a week-long star party and dusk to dawn “observathon.”
Indeed, I have to get back outside to continue shooting the Milky Way. It is another stunningly perfect night under New Mexico skies.
This was the night for Comet PANSTARRS! How often do we get to see a view like this, with a comet sitting beside a thin crescent Moon. Spectacular!
Again tonight, about a dozen visiting and resident Canadians gathered for a roadside star party north of Rodeo, New Mexico, to view the comet and Moon setting together over the Chiricahua Mountains. It was a stunning sight and made for a picture postcard image. The two set almost simultaneously, with the tail of the comet and “dark side of the Moon” lit by Earthshine the last to disappear behind notches in the mountain ridge.
And tonight, with the comet higher, it was visible to the naked eye for the first time, but only just โ the sighting was made easier because you knew exactly where to look.
The Moon was just 3o+ hours old, so appeared as a very thin crescent. The entire disk of the Moon was visible, the rest lit by Earthshine, sunlight reflected off the Earth. In the clear New Mexico air, the Earthshine was easy to see even in the bright twilight. But adding in the comet made for a once-a-lifetime view.
As soon as they set together, we all cheered and applauded, almost like at an eclipse. It was a memorable night, the kind you always hope for from a comet. PANSTARRS performed tonight!
This was the sky scene Sunday night, February 10, as an ultra-thin Moon entered the evening sky, providing me with a “personal best” for sighting a young Moon.
I’ve had to highlight and annotate the subjects here but all the players were obvious in binoculars. Only Mercury, usually the most elusive planet, was obvious to the naked eye. Below it shone dimmer Mars, here embedded in some cloud.
But the real catch of the night was the 18-hour-old crescent Moon, shimmering low in the red twilight. It appears as a razor-thin crescent, magnified in the inset. Sighting any Moon younger than 24 hours old is considered a find, the all-time record being a Moon about 14 hours old. I’m happy with an 18-hour catch!
On Sunday night conditions were nearly ideal, despite the clouds, with the Moon angled about as far from the Sun as it could be from my northern latitude, positioned directly above the sunset point. You can tell that because the crescent, which must be oriented toward the Sun, appears nearly horizontal.
This is the New Moon that also signals the start of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. ย Soย ่ฟๆฅๆฅ็ฆ !
The Moon lights up a sparkling snowscape on the night it was close to Jupiter, as Orion and the winter stars rise.
The Moon is the bright and overexposed glow at upper right. Look carefully and you can just make out Jupiter above the Moon, almost lost in its glare. Below shines Orion, with Sirius the Dog Star just coming up above the distant trees. The Pleiades, at top above the Moon, complete this winter sky scene from Monday, January 21, 2013.
I’m glad I didn’t have to go far to shoot it, just 20 feet out the front door. Standing there for just 15 minutes was a chore, with a wicked east wind blowing in -18ยฐ C temperatures. This was a night that would normally fall below my threshold of tolerance for winter observing. But with the Moon so close to Jupiter it was worth a little pain for the gain of a neat winter sky portrait.
The image is a composite of a long and short exposure, in order to capture Jupiter so close to the Moon which, in a single long exposure, would have overexposed so much its light would have swamped Jupiter.
The cool blue of this scene fits the night โ a bitterly cold winter night as the gibbous Moon passed below Jupiter.
This was the view as the sky got dark on Monday, January 21, 2013 with a close conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter underway. The Moon was closer to Jupiter later in the evening but I wanted to shoot it at sunset to capture the duo before for the sky got too dark and the Moon too bright and prone to overexposure. Even so, to capture the scene as your binocular-aided eyes saw it, I combined 4 different exposures for an “HDR” stack.
This is the closest we in North America will see the Moon by Jupiter in a darkened sky until 2026. But just next month those in southern Australia get to see a rare occultation, or “eclipse” of Jupiter by the Moon. It doesn’t get any closer than that!
To northern eyes this looks like an old Moon in the morning sky, but this is really a young Moon in the evening sky โ seen from Australia.
This was the waxing crescent Moon a few nights ago in the early evening sky. Because I took thisย from a latitude of 30ยฐ south, the Moon is turned over almost 90ยฐ from the way northern hemisphere viewers would see it from Canada or the northern U.S.
For this image, I shot ten exposures from 1/30s to 15 seconds and merged them into one “high dynamic range” composite using Photomatix Pro software. The result is an image withย detail in both the bright sunlit crescent and in the dark side of the Moon visible here lit by Earthshine, sunlight reflected off the Earth. The resulting “HDR image” compressed the wide range of brightness into one image, to show the Moon the way your eye would see it but that photo technology is still not capable of recording in one exposure.
One of the great joys of sailing and being out on the water is the wonderful sunsets. In this case, sunset included a fine moonrise.
This is the gibbous Moon of November 26 in the evening sky over the Whitsunday Islands in Australia. On this evening we were moored in Baur Bay, at South Molle Island. The bright waxing Moon shines amid the red clouds in the east still lit by the last rays of the setting Sun from the west. It is everyday scenes like this, painted with the wonderful palette of colours only the sky can provide, that you begin to appreciate all the more โ or more to the point, simply see โ as you become “sky aware.” So no great science lessons to learn here โ just some beautiful colours to soothe the soul as gentle waves lap against the side of the ship.
The annual Harvest Moon shines over a scene from pioneering farm days.
One of the last remaining wood grain elevators still stands as a historic roadside attraction near the little hamlet of Dorothy, Alberta. It’s seen better days.
But in its time it took part in many a harvest in the Red Deer River valley. There were once no less three grain elevators here and railway tracks to take away the bountiful harvest. That was back in the 1910s and 1920s when Dorothy was a little boom town. But the prosperity waned in the Depression Years, and never returned. In the 1960s, the railway tracks were pulled up, and two of the elevators torn down.
Now, Dorothy is one of the ghost towns amid the badlands of the Red Deer River valley.
I shot this Saturday night, as the Full “Harvest” Moon rose over the hills, shining in the blue shadow of the Earth. This is one frame of 450 in a time-lapse sequence.
The Harvest Moon rises behind a new crop, a wind turbine harvesting the wind.
I shot this Friday evening, September 28, technically the day before Full Moon and the annual Harvest Moon. The location is amid the Wintering Hills Wind Farm northeast of me and south of Drumheller, Alberta.
This is one frame of 450 in a time-lapse sequence going from sunset into twilight with the Moon rising through the clouds. The changing colours were wonderful.
Here was the scene on September 12, with Venus and the Moon in conjunction in the dawn sky.
Orion stands above the trees, and at top is Jupiter amid the stars of Taurus. The star Sirius is just rising below Orion. And both the Moon, here overexposed of necessity, and Venus shine together below the clump of stars called the Beehive star cluster in Cancer. This was quite a celestial panorama in the morning twilight.
This is a stack of two 2-minute exposures taken just as dawn’s light was breaking, so I get the Milky Way and even a touch of Zodiacal Light in the scene, as well as the colours of twilight. Pity I can’t avoid the lens flares!
This was the Full Moon rising on the night of another much-publicized “Blue Moon.” This was moonrise on Friday, August 31, 2012.
Of course, the Moon doesn’t look blue. Indeed, smoke and dust in the air made it look a dim yellow. Though this wasn’t the official Harvest Moon (that comes next month), it should have been, as around here in southern Alberta the harvest is well underway, thus the swathed fields and hay bales.
The Full Moon sits in the blue band of Earth’s shadow, rimmed on the top by the pink twilight effect called the Belt of Venus, caused by sunlight illuminating the high atmosphere to the east.
A couple of windmills from the large Wintering Hills wind farm add to the evening scene. I’ve spent the last couple of evenings shooting in the wind farm. More images are to come!
For this image, I combined six exposures in a High Dynamic Range stack to compress the wide range of brightnesses. Boosting the colour vibrancy also brings out the twilight colours.
The evening planet show we’ve been enjoying all year comes to a close for a while, but in grand style with a convergence of four worlds in the dusk.
This was the scene from my front driveway, Tuesday, August 21, as the waxing crescent Moon shone near Mars (just above the Moon) and Saturn (at top right just above the clouds), and near the star Spica (to the right of the Moon). The four objects formed a somewhat lopsided square in the evening twilight. But from my latitude of 51ยฐ North, they were very low and never visible in a dark sky. Enjoying them with the eyes required binoculars to pick them out.
Saturn will disappear behind the Sun shortly, but Mars hangs around in the evening sky for a few more months, but always low and easy to miss.
This was the stunning scene in the dawn sky last Sunday โ Venus, the Moon and Jupiter lined up above the Rockies.
Orion is just climbing over the line of mountains at right, while the stars of Taurus shine just to the right of Jupiter at top. I shot this at the end of a productive dusk-t0-dawn night of Perseid meteor photography. Being rewarded with a scene like this is always a great way to cap a night of astronomy.
On the afternoon of Monday, August 13 the waning crescent Moon slid in front of Venus in broad daylight. This sequence captures the disappearance.
It was touch and go getting this as high cloud kept moving through. A few minutes earlier the Moon and Venus were in clear blue sky, but at the time of the occultation, haze whitened the sky and cut down the ย contrast on an event that takes a telescope to see well. When the sky was clear it was easy to sight the Moon with unaided eyes and therefore focus your eyes on infinity. Venus next to the Moon popped into view, even naked eye. It was a rare chance to easily sight Venus in the daytime. But as it got close to the Moon Venus became harder to see naked eye, and the haze then made it impossible. But through a telescope it was just the opposite โ Venus’s bright disk stood out even when the Moon was washed out and invisible.
For southern Alberta the occultation took place at 2:11 pm MDT. I missed seeing it emerge from behind the Moon. I was already inside processing this image.
It has been quite a year for Venus. It’s not over yet, as Venus continues its morning show and has close encounters with the Moon and the star Regulus this autumn.
This was the scene Sunday evening, July 29 with the gibbous Moon shining over Banff, Alberta.
I shot this from the viewpoint on Mt. Norquay overlooking the town of Banff, a favourite evening spot for tourists. Two just happened to wander into the scene and point at the Moon right on cue.
The mountain at left is Mt. Rundle; at right is Sulphur Mountain with its Gondola lift and hot springs, the “spa” attraction that created Banff in the 1880s and inspired the CP Railroad to build its famous Banff Springs Hotel, here in the distance on the far side of the town and still the posh place to stay when in Banff.
After a day of cloud and rain, skies cleared to provide a stunning twilight scene of the Moon reflected in the calm waters of Lac Beauvert in Jasper National Park.
This is the view from the dock at the prestigious and posh Jasper Park Lodge, where the rich and famous stay when in Jasper. I was there just to shoot the sky. In the distance is the distinctive snow-covered peak of Mount Edith Cavell, a Jasper landmark. Above it shines the waxing gibbous Moon in the twilight colours.
I’ve spent the last couple of night in Jasper National Park, home to the world’s largest Dark Sky Preserve, dedicated to maintaining the darkness of the natural night sky.
This is a scene from Friday night, taken well before darkness, as the waxing Moon shone in the twilight above the Athabasca River and the peaks of the continental divide. For many years in the early 19th century fur traders plied these waters. Now rafters do.
Jasper is far enough north of me that I don’t get there very often. I’ve been spending most of my mountain time in Banff. I realize it’s been a decade or more since I’ve driven all the way up the Icefields Parkway to visit Jasper. But I was happy to be back. It has some great sites for nightscape photography.
I got two clear nights this past weekend, so a few more shots will hit the blog in the next few days.
Here’s a wider shot of the Moon-Jupiter-Venus gathering at dawn on July 14.
The clouds parted nicely for a clear view of the sky where it needed to be clear (a rare occurrence!) while adding their colour to the pre-dawn scene. I like cooperative clouds. Let’s see if they behave for tomorrow morning’s closer conjunction.
Venus and Jupiter are reprising their mutual meetings of earlier this spring, but now in the pre-dawn summer sky.
This was the scene at 4 a.m. from home on July 14, with the waning crescent Moon, here overexposed, above Jupiter and Venus at dawn. Next to Venus is the star Aldebaran and the stars of the Hyades star cluster in Taurus. Above the Moon is the Pleiades star cluster.
On July 15, the Moon will appear between Venus and Jupiter for one of the best conjunctions of 2012.
It’s been a season of crescents. A crescent Sun in eclipse. A crescent Venus before and after transit. But this is the more familiar Moon.
I caught the waning crescent Moon rising before the dawn on Saturday, June 16, after an all-night shooting session amid the summer twilight. As dawn was breaking, the Moon rose in the east and drifted through clouds near the horizon.
Here, the glow of Earthshine lighting up the dark night side of the Moon ย appears just a little brighter than the twilight sky.
This is an “old Moon,” as at this phase the Moon is three days before new, at age 26 days. At new moon, the Moon is “reborn” and appears anew as a crescent in the evening sky.
This was the kind of eclipse chasing I like โ just to the end of my driveway … to shoot the partial eclipse of the Moon before dawn on June 4.
While the car is all packed with gear for a possible flight or cross-country chase to clear skies to catch the Venus transit tomorrow, the lunar eclipse required no travel at all. Not that I was going to make too much effort at 4 am!
While some clouds got in the way, a clear hole opened up at the right time, with the remaining clouds adding a photogenic touch. I’m hoping to be as lucky for the transit!
This was just a partial lunar eclipse, with only 37 percent of the Moon immersed in the Earth’s umbral shadow at mid-eclipse, shortly after this image was taken. Even so, some of the reddening of the shadowed portion of the Moon’s disk does show up here.
I shot this from southern Alberta with a Canon 60Da and an 18-200mm lens at 115mm to frame the Moon and prairie landscape.
Spring is the season for Earthshine on the waxing Moon.
The Amazing Sky 