Moonrise Over Font’s Point


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.

 


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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