Crescent Moon

As I left the station on the way home this evening, I saw a fantastic sight: a beautiful crescent moon, accompanied by Venus, bright and bold in the sky.

Normally when this happens, the clouds have rolled in or the moon has dipped below the horizon before I’ve managed to get home and fetch my camera. This time, I wasn’t about to let that happen.

So I frantically cycled home, realised how tiring it was to frantically cycle home, and then grabbed my camera.

The Moon is bright and clear; below and to the left is Venus. If the image looks really starry then, like me, you probably need to clean your screen.

I really want to lie in a field and stare at the moon. I really don’t think we as a species fathom it properly. It’s a big lump of rock a quarter of a million miles away in space, reflecting light from a sun 92 million miles away with enough luminance to light a dark night (at least, on a full moon). It still amazes me that we take something like that for granted.

Photographing the moon like this proved to be a bit of a challenge. My usual guides seem to be more targeted at fuller moons that are giving off more light; when I used their suggested settings the results were a little dark. I managed to grab a few shots, but only by pushing the ISO higher than I normally would.

However, by cropping down to four megapixels – as I did earlier in the month when I last shot the Moon – there is still an amazing amount of clarity to be seen.

As a mentioned last time, photographs of the Moon at any any time other than when it’s full look more interesting; the terminator (technical term for where the light bit meets the dark bit) brings out much more detail and makes the Moon look like the aforementioned lump of rock in space.

It is still a bit weird to me that we’ve not been back there in thirty years. We should be living there by now.