A composite image of the rising of the December 29, 2020 "Cold" Full Moon into a very clear evening twilight sky, here over the Badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta. The Moon rose with the Sun still up and lighting the landscape in warm tones, contrasting with the cool blues of the snowy landscape and sky. The pink Belt of Venus glow lights the lower sky near the horizon. It is not often we get a Full Moon (it was only 4 hours before being officially Full this night) rising with the Sun still up and illuminating the landscape. This is a layered blend of 13 exposures taken at 5-minute intervals, from moonrise just before sunset, to the Moon high in a dark sky more than an hour later. The ground and sky near the horizon is a blend of the first four exposures while the upper sky is from the last two exposures to place the now bright Moon into a darker sky as it actually appeared. The Moon moves its own diameter in about 2 minutes, so picking shots taken 5 minutes apart provides a good spacing for a shot with this field of view. Shots with longer telephoto lenses would be better with Moons taken every 3 to 4 minutes. These frames were taken as past of an 800-frame time lapse with the camera on auto exposure to ensure each frame was well exposed for the ground and sky. But as the Moon brightens as it rises that inevitably overexposes the Moon's disk — the exposure sequence I used here works for the time-lapse but is not so ideal for a composite still image like this. Had I wanted this to be shot taken just for a still image composite I would have had to fix the exposure at more or less what it was at mid-sequence here, to keep the lunar disk at that brightness and detail. So be it! All were with the Rokinon 85mm lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 100. It was about -10° C this evening.
A 180° panorama of the rising Full Moon and twilight colours over the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta on December 29, 2020. This was the "Cold Winter" Moon of 2020. The view is overlooking the Red Deer River valley. I shot this panorama from the Park's entrance gate viewpoint. The image is a 14-segment panorama with the 50mm Sigma lens at f/4.5 and Canon EOS Ra at ISO 100, stitched with Adobe Camera Raw. The original is 34,000 pixels wide.
Jupiter and Saturn, on the eve of their rare "Great Conjunction," shot here on December 20, 2020 from Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta. The two planets are very close here, only 8 arc minutes apart, just 2 arc minutes more than at closest approach the next night (which was cloudy!). Even so, they are resolved in this image with an 85mm lens, and were easily resolvable to the naked eye. Some of the moons of Jupiter are visible, particularly Callisto and Ganymede to the left of Jupiter. This was a superb night at the Park, with perfect skies and a mild temperature of only 0° C and no wind or frost. Illumination is from the twilight but also moonlight from the waxing quarter Moon off frame to the upper left. This is a blend of tracked (for the sky, to prevent star trailing) and untracked (for the ground) exposures: 7 x 30 second exposures for the ground (to bring out foreground detail) at f/2.8 and 5 x 8-second exposures for the sky at f/4, all at ISO 400 and with the Rokinon 85mm lens and Canon EOS Ra camera. The camera was on the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i tracker. Stacking the tracked shots blurred the moving clouds and smoothed noise. Stacking the ground reduced noise. I shot this well past traditional "blue hour" when there was still colour in the sky to the camera, but the sky was dark enough to show stars, and the ground was beginning to light up with moonlight, highlighting the snow and ice patches.
