A composite of 4 exposures of the rising Full Moon on New Year’s Day, 2018, rising from left to right over a snowy prairie horizon in southern Alberta. This was the largest and closest Full Moon of 2018 and so ranked as a “supermoon,” or perigean Full Moon. It is the first Full Moon of January, as the next Full Moon is January 31, when the Moon will also be totallty eclipsed. Layers of warm air aloft moving in after an extreme cold snap of -30° C temperatures created the inversion layer which led to the very distorted lunar disk as it rose. Segments of the disk snapping off at the top and bottom presented slight green (first two images) and red flashes (last two images) or tinted segments on the edge of the disk. This is a composite of 4 out of 500 images shot for a time-lapse sequence, layered in Photoshop. All were with the 66mm f/7 William Optics apo refractor and Canon 60Da camera firing 1/25th second exposures every 1 second.
The bright star Aldebaran about to be occulted by the waning gibbous Moon on the morning of September 12, 2017. The Moon is amid some high cirrus cloud, adding the coloured glow around the Moon. This is an HDR stack of 7 exposures from 1/200th to 0.3 seconds to accomodate the large range in brightness of the scene. The star itself comes from the single longest exposure. The HDR exposures were merged and blended with Photomatix Pro 6 with Contrast Optimizer. Taken with the Astro-Physics 130mm apo refractor at f/6 and the Canon 60Da.
A composite of the Perseid meteor shower on the night of August 11/12, 2017, taken from home in rural Alberta, over a wheatfield with the waning Moon rising at right. The radiant point in Perseus is just left of centre. M31 is right of centre; Cassiopeia is above centre. As usual, there is one imposter satellite above the radiant looking like a meteor moving in the right direction, but with a uniform trail that gives it away as a satellite. The Moon was a waning gibbous this night. This is a composite of 19 images: one for the foreground and sky and one meteor, and 18 for other meteors layered in using Lighten mode and masked to reveal just the meteors. The camera was not tracking the sky, so the meteor layers were all rotated around Polaris at upper left to place the meteor for that frame in the correct position in the sky relative to the background stars where it appeared, to preserve the perspective of the radiant point in Perseus, which rose through the night. The images were taken from a full set of 700 images taken over 4.5 hours from 10:42 pm to 3:04 am. The base image is from 11:46 pm just after moonrise. Each exposure was 20 seconds at f/2.5 with the Rokinon 14mm lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 3200. I used the camera’s internal Interval Timer set to 22 second interval for shots as quickly as possible with a mimumum of “dark time.”
