clouds across the moon – the ra band
I’ve been preparing all weekend to photograph the supermoon tonight. I cancelled my practice shots last night because of cloud but the forecast for tonight was for broken cloud with low chance of rain so I was hopeful. But the outturn was a sky completely covered in cloud so I went to bed, planning to try again tomorrow night.
Mandy woke me around midnight to say that the sky was largely clear, and asked if I wanted to get up to try photographing it. My first response was to go back to sleep but then I thought about my refusal to get up out of my sleeping bag in my tent to see the dawn over Ayers Rock back in 1980. Next I remembered how glad I was and have been ever since that my Dad woke me in July 1969 to watch the first moon landing.
So I changed my mind, got up, dressed and went outside to find lots of wispy cloud speeding dramatically in front of the moon. And also discovered that my tripod wouldn’t allow me to tilt the camera steeply enough to capture the moon that high in the sky. It would have been better to catch the moon nearer the horizon, shortly after moonrise, which today was around 16:40. It’s due to set around 06:40 tomorrow (i.e. in about five and a half hours) but I’m not going to wait up that long.
So, it’s back to the option of trying again early tomorrow evening (moonrise around 17:24). At least I got a couple of atrocious handheld shots to establish a rough idea of exposure length – around 1 second, (at f16 on 100 ISO), though the article I’d read online had led me to expect around 1/125 or 1/250 at f11, so I’m regarding tonight’s experience as useful practice.
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