During my road trips across North America, I’ve shared plenty of Moon photographs with you via this blog and on social media. Most of those images came from the Great Plains, where wide-open horizons and clear prairie skies mean that a great lunar show is a virtual certainty. But in my zip code, getting shots of heavenly objects is often problematic. It seems that I live in a particularly cloudy area—or rather, always cloudy at the worst possible times. I’ve missed a lot of interesting celestial events as a result of uncooperative weather here at home.
And while the pervasive orange glow of this city’s light-polluted sky is enough to overwhelm all but the brightest stars and planets, the Moon is always an easy target on those welcome cloudless nights. Here are twenty Moon pics that I shot locally…most of them from right in my own front yard. By default, I’ll use my old Nikon 300mm f/2.8 ED-IF lens when photographing the Moon. The image above, however, was captured by attaching a DSLR to my Orion 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope (1300mm focal length).
Below, the penumbral eclipse of the Snow Moon, as seen through high, thin clouds on February 10, 2017…
The Color of Butter…
Fifty/Fifty…
It’s not often that I shoot the Moon with my film cameras, but it does happen occasionally. Here are two shots of a spooky sky captured on Ilford FP4 35mm film…
And a double exposure made on a very old roll of Yugoslavian 35mm film, Efke KB21…
A summer moonrise through the trees along the river…
Another summer Moon, rising above the Pontiac…
Outbound…
Just before sunrise, a colorful orb sinks in the western sky…
Believe it or not, this is also a color image, but the air was especially clear on this night and the Moon was riding high in the sky. Our atmosphere chose not to augment the moonlight on this occasion…
Throw & Catch…
A sub-zero morning in January; the Wolf Moon illuminating my frozen kitchen window…
The Old Banana Tree…
Shooting the sky over the years, I eventually developed a fever for spotting thinner and thinner crescents—those that appear just one or two days on either side of the New Moon…
(Follow this link to view my slimmest crescent on record, captured in New Mexico, May 2021.)
I have one more crescent to show you. But it happens to be the other crescent visible in our sky—the planet Venus. This image was taken on March 16, 2017, about one week before Venus reached inferior conjunction. It’s a bit fuzzy, due to that evening’s stiff wind which kept rattling my telescope…
Keep looking up!
Riding with Carl 