Full Moon Rising

Colors are ok, clarity is not, composition needs serious work.

This kind of shot is very hard to get, at least when it is done as well as this.  One has to take it a day or two before the actual full moon so that the earth is still bright along with the full moon.  One also has to have a long enough lens to see the detail on the moon--but not so long that one does not lose the detail on the ground.  Sometimes helps to stop down a lot on a shot like this--how much depends on the size of the format, and how much light is available.

I like everything about it, all the more knowing how hard it can be to get.

Gets a "7" from me and goes in my Favorites folder.

--Lannie

Landrum,

It was an interesting nite. Sunset was 8:11, moonrise was 7:48. So the sky was pretty bright as the moon rose above the horizon. For reasons that I don't understand the AF wouldn't work (on the tree in the foreground) so I had to manually focus.

Thanks for you comments.

Marvin

Marvin, those times you gave would only give you twenty-three minutes from the time the moon rose until the sun went down.  That would not be nearly enough to get this, especially since the lighting indicates that the sun was still up at the time this was made, which was almost certainly ten minutes (if not more) after moonrise--and it would be some minutes before the sun went below the true horizon. (The moon takes about two minutes to rise by its own diameter, to give some idea as to how long the moon has been up, which cannot be told unless we can see the true horizon.)

I checked the times for the east coast, and the moon rose about an hour and forty minutes (more or less) before sunset on that date.  The moon rises about fifty minutes later every night, and so one-eighth of that would give about six minutes.  So, the difference between moonrise and sunset  would not have changed by more than about six minutes in the three hours (one-eighth of a day) that it took for the earth to rotate enough for "moonrise" to get to the west coast--but you were near the east coast, and so our differing locations north and south would have been the only factor.  (The angle of sunset, etc., is different as far north as you are.)  So, my guess is that those times you have might not be right.  If you check them again for the location (or at least the longitude) there, I would be interested in seeing how much a difference longitude itself makes.  It might make for some substantial difference, since you are getting closer to the "land of the midnight sun" up in Maine.  I just don't know by how much.

In other words, to get a shot similar to this, you typically need an hour or two or more between moonrise and sunset (depending on the terrain), since at actual sunset the earth is already getting pretty dark.  It turns out that in July of this year you could get that where you and I both were on the same day--and so I was wrong about that in my original post.  Most months, it would be safer to try it a day or two before the actual full moon.

None of it matters, since you got a great shot, but, if you were to try it again, you might want to try for a day or two before the moon is actually full.  (It will look about the same as a full moon.)  You had one of those rare enough days that it could actually be done on the day of the full moon.

HERE is my first shot to get something like this.  It was the full moon, but the earth was already in shadow--the sun had set.  I brought the shadows up a bit in Photoshop, since the earth appears quite dark very quickly after sunset in photos.  I have links on that page to efforts much better than mine.

Great work, in any case.  I do wish that you would check the sunset and moonrise times for July, 2016 at or near that location--and let me know if I am wrong.  (Google "full moon" with the name of the nearest city and state, along with month and year.)  I just don't believe that twenty-three minutes would have been nearly enough.  (It conceivably could if one were looking east across the ocean with a white boat out there to catch the last light of day as the full moon is getting bright enough to be seen above the haze.)

I have seen some really good shots of the full moon with the earth still lit up.  Yours is among them.  Congratulations on a fine shot.

--Lannie

I was likely wrong, given how far north you are.  I corrected part of what I wrote, but did not get it all corrected before time ran out.  I doubt that what I said is now coherent, since I managed to change some things but not all.

I remember noticing from my summer in Ecuador how the sun and moon rose straight up out of the ground near the equator.  Up in Maine?  Whew!  The angle would be very, very different.  This would change everything.  Forget most of my wordy response above.  I thought when I first wrote it that you were shooting from out West, not way up North.

Sorry that I did not get it all straightened out before the time ran out on me.  I was operating on the basis of false assumptions.  Maybe you can figure out what I needed to say, in spite of my incoherence.

Glad to see that that Tamron came through.  I have been looking at it myself.

Was this shot hand-held?

(By the way, I was wondering how this photo might look with a bit of adjustment in curves and levels in Photoshop.)

--Lannie

Lannie,

Was this shot hand-held? No - tripod.

(By the way, I was wondering how this photo might look with a bit of adjustment in curves and levels in Photoshop.) I did what I could with this JPEG in PS. I'm using my laptop on this trip so it's not the best monitor.

I didn't see your corrected explanation at first. My wife, my astronomist, was getting out her data to explain it. But she would note that we were on Cadillac Mountain 44.3526° N, 68.2251° W (1529 feet high) - so the sun sets a few minutes later relative to sea level. Very confusing for me but not for her.

Marvin

Thanks, Marvin.  When I thought you were simply due west of me, what I was saying made sense--but then I noticed that you were to the far north.  That's a game changer!

--Lannie

As I said - The camera was having trouble AFing so I manually focused. But I had a number of similar shots which may be better that I still haven't looked at yet.

I would love to see them.

As for being on a mountain, I have heard that the earth drops away pretty fast in terms of curvature, so I guess that even 1500 feet could make a noticeable difference.  (Consider how fast--or slow--the hull or sail of a ship drops over the horizon as they sail out--and that would be less than one hundred feet.)  I also saw something on PBS not long ago about how much curvature there is on a "flat" lake.  I think that it was one of Stephen Hawking's programs, this one mentioning how long ago people were able to infer the diameter from the earth based on such assumptions that angles would change, etc.)  So, if the sun "set" later (was visible longer) and the moon "rose" earlier (was visible earlier--both because of the altitude effect) that would certainly increase the difference in time between sunset and moonrise.  "Sunset was 8:11, moonrise was 7:48."  So, if those were sea level times, I guess that at 1500' the time would have been stretched out more between moonrise and sunset--allowing more sunset on the earth while the moon was up.

I would never have thought to make the comment in the first place except for something I noticed long ago--and I am sure that you have noticed, too: when the sun goes down, we can still see the earth around us very well as well as detail on the moon, for up to about forty-five minutes.  But the camera cannot see both!  The earth goes dark very fast for the camera while the moon is beaming away.  So, that is why I have suggested getting out there on a day before the full moon, when one has about fifty minutes more than the next day before the sun goes down--so that one can get both earth and moon in full daylight in the same exposure.  I have seen some good shots made that way, some in the afternoon, often with a bright object on the earth to serve as a good counterpoint to the bright moon, always glaring away at "sunny 16" in broad daylight, uh, sunlight.

What this discussion has meant to me is that there is always something else that I haven't considered--haven't even thought about.  Your wife must be one smart cookie--and you, too.  It's great that you can get her to go on these outings with you.

I'll leave you alone now.  Thanks for the new insights--from both of you.

--Lannie

Marvin, here is one more shot of the moon made the same day:

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=18267983&size=lg

--Lannie