First Quarter, October 17, 2018, 9:50 PM

First quarter, August 22, 2015

First quarter, August 22, 2015, 9:16 PM. Unsharp masking applied.

Waxing crescent, November 28, 2014

The evening of November 28, 2014 started out clear and cold. I was heading out to Scranton to take part in the Kick Out the Bottom Open Voice reading, but first I wanted to grab some images of the Waxing Crescent (nearly First Quarter) Moon. I set up the tripod and took a few images. 

Waxing crescent, November 28, 2014, 6:07 PM. Unsharp masking applied.

Waxing crescent, November 28, 2014, 6:07 PM. 60 frames per second, sharpness and contrast enhanced.

A few hours later, when I got home from Scranton, things had changed quite a bit. The Moon, of course, had sunk lower in the West, but now the sky was full of wispy clouds. The Moon had also moved into the neighborhood of smoke from chimneys (mostly from natural gas furnaces) and was dangerously close to some power lines and branches.

9:49 PM, November 28, 2014. Thomas Kinkade painted the Moon too low.

I took a shot at capturing the Moon, hoping to see how the terminator had advanced in the last three and a half hours. Unfortunately, the haze made it difficult to see much detail.

Waxing crescent, 9:51 PM, November 28, 2014. Shot through clouds.

Waxing crescent, 9:51 PM, November 28, 2014. Same image as previous, but with unsharp masking applied. It doesn't help, much.

First quarter and clouds, October 1, 2014

Wednesday, October 1 was the First Quarter point, the day the the Moon appears lit up on its Western-facing half. It was also just the second day of this lunar cycle that wasn't completely clouded out - for a little while.

The Moon seemed unusually bright, and the camera had a hard time adjusting to it. Tripod shot at 42x magnification. Image taken at 8:19 PM, shortly before the Moon vanished entirely - see below.

I used my standard trick for teasing out detail when the Moon is so bright: I took images at 60 frames per second and enhanced them. This mode takes sixty lower-resolution shots in a row, and the images are usually so dim that, except at Full Moon, some enhancement is needed. I crank up the brightness and the contrast to manipulate the data in the image so that things that are washed-out in regular images become visible. This results in an eerie view of the Moon under lighting conditions that we never experience in real life, showing craters and rays and highlands that are not visible in a typical image. Taken at 8:12 PM.

A huge, thick cloud bank rolls to cover the Moon at 8:15 PM. In a few minutes, this brought the evening's photography to an end, and I was able to resume my garbage night duties. Note the teapot of Sagittarius directly below the Moon.

August 4, 2014, 9:34 PM

First quarter, July 5, 2014, 10:26 PM

First quarter Moon, July 5, 2014, 10:26 PM. Taken at 60 fps, with contrast and brightness enhanced.