A classic 22° ice crystal halo around the waning crescent Moon, here overexposed, with the Moon between Jupiter and Mars in the morning sky on December 5, 2015. Seeing a halo around a crescent Moon is somewhat rare as they usually require the brighter light of the Full Moon. Venus is the brightest object at bottom closest to the horizon. The three planets, along with the stars Spica (above Venus) and Regulus (at top of frame) define the line of the ecliptic here in the dawn late autumn / early winter sky. I captured this scene from southeast Arizona near the Arizona Sky Village at Portal. This is a stack of 4 exposures from long to short (8s to 1/2s) to encompass the great range in brightness and not overexpose the crescent Moon too much. Images were layered in Photoshop and masked with luminosity masks. Automatic HDR techniques did not work well as the shortest image was too dark for ACR to find content to register in Merge ot HDR, and in Photoshop the HDR Pro module left visible edge artifacts. The camera was on the iOptron Sky Tracker to follow the sky and register the sky for all the exposures, thus the slightly blurred ground. Taken with the Canon 6D and 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens.
A lunar corona created by diffraction effects from ice crystals or water droplets in thin, low, fast-moving clouds, on a cold winter night, after a snowstorm with the skies clearing. See http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/cormoon.htm for details of the phenomenon. This is an HDR stack of 7 exposures, from 0.4 to 6 seconds, plus an added 1/50 sec shot for the lunar disk. Shot from home with the 135mm telephoto at f/8 and Canon 6D at ISO 100.
The bright gibbous Moon over the Elbow River in Kananaskis Country in southern Alberta, on a hazy autumn night, September 2015. The Moon is surrounded by some coloured corona rings from diffracton fom droplets in the clouds. The stars are trailed because of the stacking of many exposures. This is an HDR stack of 9 exposures from 45 seconds to 1/5 second merge in Photoshop with HDR Pro utility.
