Orion and the stars of winter setting over the downtown core of Calgary, on April 19, 2018. I shot this from Tom Campbell Park, looking west. Venus is the bright object at far right; Sirius is the bright star at far left, with both flanking the skyline. Above is the waxing crescent Moon. The Pleiades is above Venus. This is a stack of 4 x 2-second exposures taken for a time-lapse and star trail set, all with the 24mm Sigma Art lens at f/2.8 and Nikon D750 at ISO 400. The Moon is from an HDR-blend of shorter exposures so its disk does not overexpose into a bright blob in the thin cloud. It better depicts the scene the way the eye saw it, though in this case the camera is picking out stars better than the eye could with all the foreground lighting and glare. No light pollution filter was employed.
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.
