No Capes
The Supermoon on Nov. 14th was supposed to be a good one. The close approach of the Moon in it's orbit was to be very close to the time of full Moon, more so than any Supermoon since 1948 I think I remember reading.
I have seen some Supermoons in the past and yes, they look big and bright, but so does every full Moon. It's a little hard to compare them since the last time I could have seen a full moon was 28 days ago and do I really know just exactly how big and bright that one was? So honestly I wasn't expecting anything all that stupendous but was happy that there was something about astronomy that was in mainstream media, perhaps since the Moon is an embarrassingly easy observational target!
The fourteenth fell on a Monday so I was going to be at my regular Monday stargaze at Marriott's ‘The Barony’ resort. Start time for those events is 8pm this time of year and I was expecting a good turnout since the weather was predicted to be clear that night.
One of the things about giving these stargazes right next to the ocean is that you get to see things rise over the ocean and nothing looks better than a full Moon rising over the ocean. Rise time this night was 5:56pm so I got there early and walked out to the beach with my camera and tripod since I knew there would be no way I could hold the camera steady enough for the length of exposures I'd be taking.
Recon
I got out early to select my spot and began to look around a bit. First order of business was to assess where the Moon was going to rise exactly over the ocean. For that I used one of those apps you can have on your smart phone that gives you a live map of the sky behind your phone as you hold it up to the sky. I could see where the Moon was just below the horizon and then referenced that point to a boat mast from a sailboat that was parked on the beach. So now that I knew where the Moon was going to rise (I wanted to see if I could get a good shot of the Moon only partially risen over the ocean) I turned my attention to the deepening twilight west with the brilliant planet Venus in the skyglow.
Getting Dynamic
The hardest part about taking a photo of this scene is the tremendous difference in brightness between the sky and the land. If you just focus on the sky you get a bright dot against a sky, not an engaging shot so you want to get some land in there to get some perspective on the scene. Problem is the land is so dark compared to the sky if you expose it well the sky is so bright you lose the look of the sunset sky. Enter high dynamic range photography, also known as HDR.
Your eye can see more than ten, up to perhaps fourteen f-stops (brightness levels) whereas your average camera can do about 5-8, and a really expensive digital camera can do eight to eleven. My camera is nothing special but using HDR I can take pictures like this. The only real stipulation is you have to be shooting from a tripod and it helps if there isn't too much motion present in your shot (people running, bikes etc.)
What you do essentially is compose your shot, then take five exposures, one two stops too dark, then one stop too dark, correct exposure, one stop too bright and two stops too bright. I then run this photoset through a program called Bracketeer (there are many software tools to do this, I'm not saying Bracketeer is the best but it's inexpensive and does the trick) and it picks the best exposed parts of all five images and infuses them all together into one image that has the dynamic range of a really good camera or the eye.
Here is the shot I got:
An HDR photograph of Venus setting in the West
Moonrise over the ocean is always great (there's a couple shots of normal full Moons rising in Gallery page here) but this one had the potential to be spectacular! I got reacquainted with the rise point and as 5:56pm came and went I didn't see anything at first until about a minute into I saw a brilliant red arc, red as a stop sign, appear over the ocean beyond a ship!
I was amazed how red and bright it was and I scrambled to get the camera zoomed and focused and start taking pics none of which came out because they were blurred by the act of my finger pressing the shutter–these were 3-4 second exposures. I have since resolved to use the timer.
I was also amazed at how fast the Moon was rising, which made it very difficult to try and get many exposures hoping that one would come out both in focus and properly exposed.
My best result was this one:
Supermoonrise over Hilton Head Island, November 14th, 2016
It only takes the Moon two minutes to get up over the horizon so once that event was passed I shot about one hundred and fifty exposures in every possible camera setting and composition I could think of until a few minutes before 7pm when it became time to set up the telescopes. I grabbed the camera and tripod and made my way to the car to retrieve the scope and accessories.
Scoping it Out
I spent the next hour setting up my telescope and the one The Barony bought for the stargaze events. There are a lot of little details to attend to so I wasn't really monitoring the Moon's progress through the sky but wasn't lacking for light while I was setting up for sure! By the time I was set up the Moon had risen about a third of the way up and was looking amazingly bright. A good Supermoon is both larger and brighter than a regular full Moon; 14% larger and 30% brighter. The Moon looked large for sure but the thing that really blew me away was the brightness! I have never seen one this bright before. I put the 10-inch scope on it in preparation for the guests arrival and was getting it all focused and centered.
First Eye Blind
Any time you look at the Moon through a scope, when you are done you're eye will have stopped down due to the tremendous amount of light hitting it, giving you that ‘blind in one eye’ feeling as you step away from the eyepiece. Usually you're back to normal in thirty seconds but after this it took like a minute and a half! I was amazed and made sure to mention it to people as they were looking so no one would potentially lose their balance coming away from the eyepiece.
I had my scope showing a close as possible view that still kept the entire disk visible while got out my best 2-inch eyepiece and barlow lens for a 160x view at some of the more interesting areas like the heavily cratered region around crater Tycho (featured prominently in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) and it's long ejecta rays that can be traced for hundreds of miles.
With a Moon this bright there was really nothing else to look at that night so we kept moving the high power view to new locations until everybody had had their fill. At the end of the night, the ‘die-hards’ and I tried to look at some other things but it was just useless, the Moon was just too bright.
Here are a couple more photos of the moon rising over the ocean.
Bill Gwynne, aka Bill the Sky Guy
The Supermoon about one half hour after moonrise.
Lucky dog; now there's a Moon to howl at!