Yesterday’s Full Moon seriously limited the amount of deep-space imaging I’ve been able to do lately, but also provided a great opportunity for some “terrestrial” photography. My friend, Mike, had calculated where we needed to be to place the rising moon just over Font’s Point, a popular local attraction. I wasn’t really prepared for this in that I didn’t have a long focal length lens and hadn’t worked out how to bracket the exposures to capture both the dimly lit foreground and the very bright moon. This was captured with a 200mm lens on a Nikon D300 camera. I could have used the SVX80T telescope, or even the William Optics FLT-132 to get more of a close-up on the moon. But given that there is almost 4 miles of hot sand between our location and the point, the air was pretty shaky, and it’s not likely that I would have gotten a significantly sharper image.
Nevertheless, if you look very closely, you can see some small “blips” on the point, that I believe are people who went up there to watch either the sunset or moonrise – or both. Here’s a 1:1 crop:
Although the moon will be ruining the night sky for a while, I’m working on a narrowband image of IC410 that I hope to be able to finish in a few days.