I had this in the back of my head for a few days, just as I’ve done for several years prior, when I remember to check that is (which is infrequently.) But the setting moon was going to be just 1.1% illuminated this evening, right after sunset, and the sky was crystal clear, so I elected to try again.
[Wow. That last was five years ago – I wouldn’t have said that much time had passed.]
I was out in a great location for visibility, being able to see within a couple of degrees of the astronomical horizon, which is essentially what you’d see out over the ocean – my visibility wasn’t that good, but close. And when I knew it should be coming into visibility, I fired off a wide frame just to see if it could be spotted later on in editing, because I hadn’t seen any sign of it yet.
And indeed, it could be. See it there? This is shot at 150mm, the widest setting for the Tamron 150-600, and I made sure to include the streetlight for reference. But if you’re not seeing it, there’s this different crop of the same image:
That’s the whole height of the frame, so you should be able to go back and locate it in the original above it, but I admit it’s very very faint. Not long after taking this frame, I found the crescent in the binoculars and the with the long lens, this time at 600mm, and began firing off frames.
Venus was up already, so I was using that, and passing airliners, to attempt to focus tightly, thought this one is probably just a hair off. But I like the color.
After a few minutes, I decided to try the 2x teleconverter for some frames, though to be honest, the edge that it provided was only to make things bigger in the frame, because it wasn’t likely to resolve things any better and increased the risk of both slower shutter speeds, and greater susceptibility to camera shake, reducing the quality.
And then of course, there’s atmospheric distortion, which I wasn’t likely to get past – North Carolina always has a certain higher background level of humidity, except on very rare occasions, and even when the sky looked totally cloud and haze free, the banding visible near the horizon meant that distortion was going to be a factor – this was as sharp as it was going to get, especially since such crescents are only going to be found right down near the horizon because they’re otherwise overwhelmed by the sunlight and atmospheric scatter of that. Still, the barest hint of the lunar disk is becoming visible at this point, as the earthshine was showing through the darkening sky. It shows better a short while later:
Sunlight is still hitting most of the Earth that faces the moon at this point, and that’s reflecting off of the lunar surface back down to us; it’s actually close to as bright as it can get. But locally, the sky was catching too much sunlight bouncing through from over the horizon, so the earthshine wasn’t becoming visible until those light levels had dropped far enough.
It was getting quite close to setting at this point, already well below what I would have been able to see at any other shooting location that I’ve tried this within.
These are the traffic lights for the low drawbridge that crosses the river that I was shooting across, and I’m amazed that they came out this distinctly, since they were only silhouettes to me standing there. I realized that I really didn’t want the moon setting against traffic signals, so I shifted my position along the river edge a short distance, but had too little time to get picky.
I had attempted a few longer exposures to try and bring up more earthshine detail, but the wind off of the river and the lowering light levels were conspiring against me and those pics are being discarded. Here, we actually have the drawbridge barriers and passing traffic in the scene. The last images that I took, with the moon disappearing into the trees, were also far too shaky and not what I wanted, so this is the end as far as I’m concerned. But it was worth the effort, and The Girlfriend was along for the ride this time and got to see it through the binoculars as well. Nice little short excursion, and allowed me to squeeze in even more pics and a post for the end of the month.
Now, I actually have a goal to capture the moon illuminated by less than 1%, but .9% is probably going to be the absolute minimum I could accomplish, if that. It would mean the moon is even closer to the sun, and thus more embedded in twilight while being dimmer, so it’s a very fine edge, and the last couple of times that I tried, the humidity was too great. Meanwhile, the conditions are actually sparse, because there are only two days a month that it’s possible: the day before new moon, when it would occur just before sunrise, and the day after where it appears after sunset like this. Yet not every new moon presents these conditions, because orbital mechanics dictates that those narrow periods may be more or less illuminated, and that crucial .9% period occurs elsewhere on the planet. But I’ll keep trying.