Everyone is my friend until they prove otherwise.
Here is tonight’s moon, I’ve got something set wrong on the camera that I can’t find, these are coming out a bit dimmer than they used to. I’ll fiddle about and find it eventually, most likely it’s average white balance or something like that.
Ok, I have the dimness thing figured out, the other night I was trying to photograph firefly traces, and set the AWB method / setting to shade. Fixed now.
The sun this afternoon and tonight’s moon, these were both shot with the Canon at medium size so the detail might not be as high as you are used to if you come here often:
Amazing and beautiful high definition footage of the moon from Japan’s Kaguya probe, in four more days Kaguya’s mission will end as it impacts the surface of the moon.
Here’s tonight’s moon with thin clouds obscuring. The clouds were really pretty, and I would have liked to get them as well but could not because it would have taken a time exposure and they were moving too fast for that. I upped the output brightness and contrast so you can see the thin bands of cloud. Below is the updated and improved equivalent to the camera used along with the lens used. The resolution of the photo is greatly reduced for the website, and it’s cropped down to 1200 as all photos I post are.
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Here’s Tonight’s moon shot through high thin clouds. I had to up the contrast and brightness in P-shop just a tad so you can see the craters better.
A Shropshire Lad XXXVI
White in the moon the long road lies,
The moon stands blank above;
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
Pursue the ceaseless way.
The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
— A E Houseman
Tonight’s sunset, followed by tonight’s moonrise, taken with a Canon EOS Rebel XTI, the older 10.1 Megapixel model. The newest version is an awesome 15.1 megapixels. Canon EOS 50D 15.1MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)
Canon, they are about a sixth to an eigth of the real resolution. To get these shots I’m using a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens for Canon EOS SLR Cameras
“and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”
When I was a kid I lived for staying up late on Friday nights and watching the horror movies that were on then, like The Wolfman with Lon Chaney. It was one of the few things that tended to bring me out of my near- autistic world of otherwise incessant reading, and it was cool because horror movies were never as scary as my own imagination and what I read in books like Babi Yar or history books.
There was one movie of the supernatural that really did make me afraid, it was called “Black Sunday” (no, not the one with Bruce Dern in the Blimp, even though that is much scarier nowadays…) After watching the moody Italian gothic film about a vampire witch resurrected after having a spiked mask pounded into her face I was so frightened that when I hopped into bed I used the side rail from the bunk bed to turn out the lightswitch by leaning far, far, over, and nearly falling out. I did that because I did not want to walk from the lightswitch to the bed in the dark.
I laid there with the covers up to my chin and then heard a small scratching noise. Of course I had to look… and there in the closet was that face, that demonic mask, looking back at me. I could see the blank eye sockets, the shape, the grim mouth… it was indeed the most shocking thing I had encountered until that time, and I am certain that I was blanched and pale white.
I laid there for five minutes, or so it seemed, paralyzed with fright. I was unwilling to call out, my father was in Viet Nam, and I sure didn’t want to call my mother in because that thing might get her or my sisters.
Then it was that I decided that it could not be real. It hadn’t moved a twitch, and something inside me told me it could not exist. I had a long mental conversation to convince myself that it could not be. There was however only one way to know for certain. So sweating and pale I climbed out of the bunk bed, facing it the whole time, and walked up to the closet and put my hand on the mask I saw there.
The shadow of my hand blotted it out a moment, and I felt the closet door smooth and wooden beneath my palm. I moved my hand again, and that mask distorted again. Then I followed the light back to my window where the moon was shining through the curtains – forming by weird happenstance a simulacra of the mask from the movie with light and shadow.
I went back to the closet and looked closer – noting that the mask wasn’t perfect, that there were gaps and flaws. The knotholes in the pine pattern on the door that formed the eyes were lopsided. I couldn’t make myself see it as the mask again, even though my unbridled imagination seeded with a grim image from a chiarascurro film was able to fill the gaps and make the perfect image of that mask in my mind before I had touched it.
That’s the night that I became a rational human being; someone who knew that the mind is both fallible and suggestible, and that knowing meant having the courage to challenge assumptions and perceptions through testing.
A couple of notes: If you haven’t seen the movie I recommend it, it’s a classic horror movie that was certainly ahead of it’s time, and the cinematography is still a reference point for some.
The moon photo above was shot this way because the normal telephoto moon shots I take wouldn’t work due to high thin clouds and wind. So instead you see tree branches in a long exposure blurred by that same wind. If you click on the thumbnail and view the large version you can see the traceries repeated. Synapses in moonlight.
Oh, you ask about the scratching noise? That too I found. When I placed the rail for the bunk bed back after using it to flip the lightswitch, the paper/linen composite tag for my pillow was caught between the rail and the holder. When I moved my head it would move the tag, and the sound was amplified by the wood of the rail.
Tonight’s moon, waxing towards full, click on the thumbnail for the larger size photo view.
This was taken earlier this evening, now the moon is higher overhead and the sky darker.
