Early Sunday morning, I got up and checked the sky to see how cloudy it was and if it was worth trying to capture the moon-set after missing the moon-rise the night before. I wasn't sure, but I thought it might be ok. So after a coffee and mapping out where and when the moon was going to set I put on my coat and collected the camera bits and headed out. With my car making all those loud squeaky noises yesterday I decided to take the van which was nice because of the heated seats.
Overnight was the end of daylight savings time and not all the clocks auto-update so I kept having to figure out what clock I was looking at if the time was correct and if moonset was at 7:45am or 6:45 or some other time. Once I was outside though, I could see the moon directly and it seemed high so at least I had time to get to the location that I had mapped out.
According to photopills if I was on 26th street s.e. overlooking Deerfoot trail. I should get a nice conjunction between the downtown buildings and the moonset. Shortly after I arrived, the moon dipped behind some clouds but it looked like it'd pop out below sometime later. In the dim light I wasn't sure if the horizon was cloudy or if it was just dark sky so I decided to wait. I sat on a bench just a little ways from the parking lot that had a nice view.
As the sun came up I took a bunch of photos of downtown and noticed the light to my left looked nice so I took the photo below. I tried a couple compositions where the power poles were mostly on the right but looking at the photos later, I preferred this view.
I wasn't hopeful that I'd get a chance to see the moon as it turned out the western horizon was clouded over and not just dark like I'd hoped for earlier so I made photos as the sun came out so I'd have something to show for it. The colours had burned off the clouds so I was trying to take zoomed in photos of the buildings.
As I made photos a fellow wandered up and sat on the far end of the bench and we chatted about what I was doing. I mentioned the moon rise, we talked about the view and if the moon was still considered blue if it was now November - blue moon is second full moon in a calendar month. We didn't get into details about the specificity of when the moon is considered "full" as that moment had passed hours and hours ago..
I think I made a comment that the moon was probably set already and we just couldn't see it when all of a sudden there it was! in a gap in the clouds, just silently hanging there in the sky. I tried to grab some shots before it disappeared and zoned out of the conversation.
My initial plan was to get a tight shot of the moon right on top of the buildings but I realized my chance at anything like that was fading fast as the moon was about to disappear probably for good.
I turned my camera into portrait mode and tried to zoom in as much as I could to get a composition. I was using a big heavy lens and its kind of tricky to flip the camera on the tripod and get everything lined up and steady again. In my hasted I skipped some steps that would have made it easier. I think I was lucky to get this shot below.
A short while later, buddy had left and I also decided to head out. There was an interesting stacked cloud formation in the sky but it was wasn't quite lined up the way I wanted.. I did stop at the MaxBell parking lot to see if the clouds were lined up from there but they'd moved across the sky and had smeared out and didn't look as good.
Overall, I was happy to have capture the moon even though it wasn't quite what I'd envisioned. Maybe next month ;)
Thanks for looking.
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