Setting – The Amazing Sky

Rising Easter Full Moon (Composite)

A clear day on Easter Eve allowed me to photograph the setting Full Moon in the morning and the rising Full Moon in the evening.

This was another of the year’s special Full Moons, and this time for a valid historical reason.

This was the “paschal” Full Moon, the one used to determine the date of Easter. It was the first Full Moon after the vernal equinox. The first Sunday after that Full Moon is Easter. This year, the Moon was full about an hour before sunrise on the morning of Saturday, March 31. Easter was the next day, Sunday, April 1.

Below is the view of the Full Moon not long after it was officially Full, as it was setting into the west as the first rays of sunlight lit the foreground at dawn on March 31.

The Easter Full Moonset #1 (March 31, 2018) — The setting Full Moon on the morning of Saturday, March 31, 2018, the day before Easter. At this time, at about 7:20 a.m. MDT, the Moon was a little less than an hour after the moment of exact Full Moon, so the Sun had already risen before the Moon set. This was with the Canon 6D MkII and 200mm lens with 1.4x convertor, shot from home.

To be precise, the actual paschal Full Moon is a fictional or calculated Moon that occurs 14 days into the lunar cycle, and isn’t an observed Moon. But this year, we really did have a Full Moon just before Easter Sunday, and on the first day of Passover, from which we get the term “paschal.”

Later on March 31, after sunset, the Moon was now half a day past Full, causing it to rise a good half hour after sunset. However, the lighting and sky colour was still good enough to place a reddened Moon rising into a deep blue sky for a wonderful colour contrast.

This was also touted as a “blue Moon,” as it was the second Full Moon in March, and it was also the second blue Moon of 2018. (January had one, too.) But as you can see the Moon was hardly “blue!” It was a fine pink Moon.

Rising Easter Full Moon (Trail) — This is a stack of 424 exposueres, taken at 3-second intervals for a time-lapse, but here stacked with Lighten blend mode to create a moon trail streak. I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions in Photoshop. The final Moon disk comes from the last image in the sequence, while the ground comes from the first image in the sequence. I shot this sequence from home, using a 200mm Canon lens and 1.4x convertor, on the Canon 6D MkII. Exposures ranged from 0.8 second to 1/15 second, all at ISO 100 and f/4.

The above image is a little fun with Photoshop, and stacks hundreds of images of the rising Moon to create a “Moon trail,” showing the change in colour of the Moon as it rose.

This short HD movie includes two versions of the full time-lapse sequence:

• One showing the Moon rising normally, though the sky and ground come from the first image in the sequence.

• The second is another bit of Photoshop fun, with the Moon leaving disks behind it as it rose.

For the technically minded, I created both movies using Photoshop’s video editing capabilities to layer in various still images on top of the base video file. The stills are layered with a Lighten blend mode to superimpose them onto the background sky and video.

Rising Moon Movie Composite Screenshot — A screen shot of the Photoshop layers used to create the Moon disk composite time-lapse.

While Easter is a spring holiday, it hardly seems spring here in Alberta. The coldest Easter weekend in decades and lots of snow on the ground made this a winter scene.

With luck, spring will arrive here well before the next Full Moon.