My Quasi Valentine's Lunar Special

On a sunny but wispy cloud filled day back in January of 2009 I managed to capture a heart shaped cloud next to the moon...


Shot @ 50mm 1/60s f/11 ISO100 ~4:12pm PST 01.03.2009

So here's the background story on this picture. It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon here in San Jose, CA and there were thin wispy bits of clouds and contrails slowly drifting all over the sky. The moon was in its waxing crescent phase crossing the afternoon sky. I set my HV30 up on a tripod trying to clear as many power lines as possible from my backyard view and let it shoot the moon at the widest angle so that I could later watch the concert of clouds dance with the moon.

I would go out every 20 minutes or so to check on cloud conditions and such but would usually go back inside once I was sure the moon wasn't going to leave the frame. On my 2nd or so trip out to check on my camera I was looking up in the sky and saw IT! It being this giant heart shaped cloud off the right(west) of the moon and high in the sky. AND IT LOOKED LIKE IT WAS GOING TO FLOAT BY THE MOON! I ran back inside and got my XTi setup with my Sigma 50-500mm "the Bigma" lens. I went back out by my video camera and setup for some hybrid still action.

Fortunately this giant heart shaped cloud DID pass by the moon as I guessed it would and I was able to capture just a few shots of it in that time. Even though the clouds were moving slowly I was rather inexperienced with capturing short lived moments then. I remember it seeming like it took me forever to get my tripod setup and leveled and trying to adjust focus properly. I do wish that I had done a better job framing the moon more to the right rather than in the center of the frame. But I was also really worried about chopping off any of the heart cloud off since I only had 50-500mm on a crop sensor body to work with. I wished I could go just a bit wider than 50mm with my Bigma. However the only wider lens I only owned then was the kit lens and never cared for the medium quality images it produces compared to the Bigma. So in the end I'm actually really satisfied with what I captured :)

Here's a link to a 20x sped up clip of the video I shot that afternoon. The heart shaped cloud comes into view at about the 1m20s point in this clip. The orientation of the video camera was extremely dutch to avoid power lines (which can be seen at the very bottom of video frame) so it won't match the stills which I do believe are proper level orientation.

Valentine Cloud & Moon from Lunarphile on Vimeo.

In addition here is the moon at 500mm taken just a minute before the heart cloud picture in this post. This was taken moments after the heart cloud passed over the moon and before the wispy bits of clouds came back in frame at 500mm.


Shot @ 500mm 1/60s f/11 ISO100 ~4:10pm PST 01.03.2009

The wispy cloud beauty continued throughout the afternoon. Here is one of the other shots I liked from that day.

Shot @ 50mm 1/60s f/11 ISO100 ~4:47pm PST 01.03.2009

I wish I had spent more time outside taking stills but was probably being lazy and playing video games inside or something and just left my video camera to capture the action for me. I'll consider posting a realtime or at least less sped up version of video with audio and maybe some hybrid still action next week when my Vimeo HD allotment for the week resets.

Pre-Eclipse Agony

Ugh, I'm so anxious about tomorrow night's eclipse. Especially since there is cloud cover tonight and has been that way for the past week. Last week was clear and beautiful. This is definitely part of the love/hate relationship I have with lunar photography. I can plan and scout ideal locations as much as I want but it doesn't really matter if nature decides to blow a storm system in. I was planning on getting some great shots of the receding eclipse as it descends into into the Pacific but now I think I'll be lucky if I get ONE shot of the eclipse at it's peak.

To emphasize my point take this evening as an example. Today the moon rose in San Jose at an azimuth of 122° which is the EXACT same azimuth that it will rise tomorrow. I went to my favorite secret moonrise shooting location to get a bearing on where it would appear over the horizon but was greeted with a WALL of cloud cover that looked nice from a 'photographing clouds just before sunset' perspective but what I wanted was a clear view of the moon bursting over the horizon.


*For reference this shot was taken @ 50mm on my 50-500mm Bigma*

See the building at the lower left? The moon was supposed to come up over that area, and technically it already had when I took this pic, but was completely shrouded by clouds. The glowing dot toward the middle right of the image among the clouds is a plane approaching San Jose Airport. I stayed and waited for an hour with no success. Even more heartbreaking was the fact that to the west there was no cloud cover on the horizon, all the clouds were higher in the sky.

I will try again tomorrow but without having an exact visual cue of where to aim my lens I'll be going on rough estimates provided by GPS pointers in my phone. It was important to have an exact reference point because tomorrow I wanted to use my 1000mm lens to capture the moon coming over the horizon which would have been a first in my nearly 3 years of shooting the moon. There is so little room for error with the 1000mm lens, just 1/4° degree on each side of the moon. While each month there is often a point when the moon rises in the same spot on successive days it RARELY happens with full moon conditions, and is even less rare with a full moon that will be eclipsed later that evening. But such are the woes of being a nature photographer. I'm sure 1000 other photographers world wide had carefully planned shots ruined due to cloud cover today, and I'm sure it will happen to many others and myself in the future.

Trying to remain positive I'm definitely glad that tomorrow nights eclipse won't be a TOTAL eclipse, just a partial. That means the moon should cast enough light to shine through moderate cloud cover. I certainly have enough experience shooting gibbous and even crescent moons in a wide range of cloud conditions but I still feel nervous about tomorrow night.

As I write this every location within an hour drive of San Jose is forecast to have overcast or partially cloudy conditions. But that is 26 or so hours away from now. I guess I should just sit back and wait to see what nature gives me.

But I still have every finger and toe crossed that San Jose/Santa Cruz fog doesn't roll in until after sunrise. I won't even waste prayers on fog free conditions in SF, I know better than to ask for miracles. Please cross your fingers and toes with me :)