{"id":27968,"date":"2021-01-14T01:08:12","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T06:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=27968"},"modified":"2021-01-14T01:08:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T06:08:12","slug":"a-valiant-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2021\/01\/a-valiant-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"A valiant effort"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, okay, you’ll probably have to be the judge of that…<\/p>\n

A few days back, in the previous post, I mentioned that the rising moon the next day would be this itsy-bitsy little crescent, a mere 0.6% illuminated, preceding the sunrise by a little over 20 minutes. I also mentioned that the weather here wasn’t amenable to pursuing it.<\/p>\n

In the interim (within a day, really,) the moon became ‘New,’ meaning invisible, entirely backlit by the sun. But then, after<\/em> that, it would be an itsy-bitsy little crescent again, only this time waxing and appearing just after sunset. And that would be happening Wednesday the 13th – yesterday’s sunset. The skies had cleared almost perfectly by then, so I headed down to the lake to try my luck. It would be the slightest bit more illuminated this time, hitting 0.7%, but that’s not a lot. For reference, this one a year ago<\/a> was taken when it was 1.0% illuminated. I was curious to see just how fine I could capture this.<\/p>\n

I arrived early and had a chance to poke around before sunset, though granted, there wasn’t a lot to see. But I shot a version of a semi-frequent setting<\/a> here on the blog with the sunset light and clear sky.<\/p>\n

\"dead
As sunset drew nigh, I got the tripod out and set up, almost exactly where we’d been a few weeks back for the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction<\/a>;<\/strong> this is hardly surprising, since I was aiming in very much the same direction (and in fact, Jupiter became visible before I’d finished the session yesterday.) As the sun set, I used it as a rough aiming point, knowing that the moon would hit the horizon just south (left) of the same spot.<\/p>\n

\"clear
It would be a little over 20 minutes before the moon hit the horizon, and I knew that it wouldn’t be visible until the sky darkened a bit more, but I kept an eye out anyway. A KLM jet on its way from Atlanta to Amsterdam passed way<\/em> overhead, many kilometers distant, and I used it as a focusing point.<\/p>\n

\"KLM
And as the time counted down to moonset, I scoured the skies looking for that minimal crescent. A smidgen of thin clouds were close to the area it should appear within, but not enough to obscure it, so I diligently tracked back and forth, up and down, with the Tamron 150-600 lens.<\/p>\n

And saw… nothing. Not a damn thing. I shot several frames of the most likely areas, just to examine them once back home and see if I captured something anyway without realizing it. But nope.<\/p>\n

\"twilight
Near as I could tell, from the timestamp and the careful comparison of angles with the sunset photo and Stellarium, this frame (with a circling Piper and a very distant contrail) should<\/em> contain the moon. But even boosting the contrast off the scale in GIMP failed to produce even a hint of a crescent. Nertz anyway.<\/p>\n

While there, I glanced out over the lake and spotted a lone floating waterfowl, too silhouetted to identify but looking like a loon to me. It disappeared underwater before I had a chance to refocus, but when it reappeared I shot a few frames as it flapped momentarily, turned surreal by the light angle on the water.<\/p>\n

\"unidentified
I could have saved this or the dead tree for the end of the month abstract, but using them now just puts a little pressure on me to shoot some more this month – I’ve had the camera out twice so far, but finding almost nothing of interest, so the most successful outing this year has been shooting an illustration for a book review. Sheesh<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, I was able to find Jupiter in those same skies, and this told me I was searching in the right location, because Jupiter was above and just slightly right of where the moon was. But even with this help, I got nothing, and my few shots of Jupiter were just a wee bit out of focus, so not worth showing here – all you would have seen would be a pale spot anyway.<\/p>\n

The sky went indigo, and I switched back to a wider lens for a quick setting shot, leaving the long lens on the tripod for atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\"post-sunset
By the way, Jupiter really is<\/em> in this frame, but with the wide angle lens, even at full resolution it’s a mere speck, which didn’t carry over into resizing to blog dimensions.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I tried, and at least shot something, but not what I was after. I’m not sure the skies could have been much clearer, so I’m going to assume that not far below 1% illuminated is the point where atmospheric glow will overwhelm any chance of spotting a bare crescent. Maybe I should try for moonrise about eight hours from now, when it’ll be 2.7% illuminated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, okay, you’ll probably have to be the judge of that… A few days back, in the previous post, I mentioned that the rising moon the next day would be this itsy-bitsy little crescent, a mere 0.6% illuminated, preceding the sunrise by a little over 20 minutes. I also mentioned that the weather here wasn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,4,3],"tags":[4414,3798,5880,5879,241],"class_list":["post-27968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-nature","category-photo","tag-crescent-moon","tag-jordan-lake","tag-loon-maybe","tag-moon-not-photography","tag-moon-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}