The rising of the Full Moon on Easter eve, Saturday, March 31, 2018, on a very cold night with lots of snow still on the ground in Alberta. So this is more a winter Moon than a spring one. This is the “paschal” Moon – the one that defines the date of Easter, being the first Full Moon after the vernal equinox. The first Sunday after that Full Moon, in this case the next day, is Easter Sunday. This was also a “blue Moon” as this was the second Full Moon of March, and it was the second blue Moon of 2018, as there was one in January as well, with Full Moons on Jan 1 and Jan 31. Ditto with March. This is a composite (obviously!) of 9 exposures, with the later exposures much shorter in shutter speed to keep the Moon’s disk well-exposed as it rose. To do this I manually shortened the shutter speed by a third of a stop every couple of minutes once the Moon got high enough that its disk began to brighen relative to the sky. This facilitated the stacking of images in Lighten blend mode, as the last disks are set amid a dark sky. However, this night the sky was hazy enough that the Moon’s disk always looked yellow, if not red, as it rose. It didn’t get bright white until much later. The images were selected from 575 shot for a time-lapse, with images picked at 3-minute intervals for this composite. I shot this sequence from home, using a 200mm Canon lens and 1.4x convertor, on the Canon 6D MkII. Exposures ranged from 0.8 second to 1/15 second, all at ISO 100 and f/4. Compositing in Photoshop.
The rising of the Full Moon on Easter eve, Saturday, March 31, 2018, on a very cold night with lots of snow still on the ground in Alberta. So this is more a winter Moon than a spring one. This is the “paschal” Moon – the one that defines the date of Easter, being the first Full Moon after the vernal equinox. The first Sunday after that Full Moon, in this case the next day, is Easter Sunday. This was also a “blue Moon” as this was the second Full Moon of March, and it was the second blue Moon of 2018, as there was one in January as well, with Full Moons on Jan 1 and Jan 31. Ditto with March. This is a stack of 424 exposueres, taken at 3-second intervals for a time-lapse, but here stacked with Lighten blend mode to create a moon trail streak. I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions in Photoshop. The final Moon disk comes from the last image in the sequence, while the ground comes from the first image in the sequence. Note how the Moon changes colour as it rises and climbs above the absorption from the atmosphere that tints the Moon red on the horizon. But this night, the Moon was still quite yellow even half an hour after it rose. I shot this sequence from home, using a 200mm Canon lens and 1.4x convertor, on the Canon 6D MkII. Exposures ranged from 0.8 second to 1/15 second, all at ISO 100 and f/4.
The waxing crescent Moon over the skyline of Calgary on January 18, 2018. I shot this from Tom Campbell Park area looking southwest to the sunset twilight. This is a 2-segment panorama, each segment being a 7-image HDR stack, all blended with Adobe Camera Raw. Shot with the 50mm lens and Canon 6D MkII.
