Just a Bit Moonstruck
The alarm went off at 3:00 AM for the second day in a row. A work day to boot! What could possible lure an otherwise sane man (and his son) out of bed at such an ungodessly hour? The rising crescent moon? Yeah, a sliver of light in the predawn sky. The previous morning I had photoraphed the crescent moon aligned with Jupiter and Saturn, but one of my lenses had been dirty (surprise, I hadn't used it in 7 years!) and it washed out the moon. So, Justin and I headed out, listening to Jello Biafra's diatribe on the CD player.
The marine layer's low overcast kept us
from seeing any celestial bodies, but my experience from the previous night told me not to
worry--the Santa Monica Mountains had risen above the fog. Photos taken from Mulholland
Drive turned out fine. This morning, however, I was disappointed--Mulholland Drive was
solidly fogged in. Give up? No! Continue northwards. Twenty miles later we found ourselves
out of the fog in the Santa Clarita Valley. We pulled off the freeway at the first exit
and pulled off onto the shoulder. There, across the freeway was the rising moon!
Bummer! The moon was now no longer in alignment with Jupiter and Saturn!
The moon's apparent motion against the stars is about 12 degrees per day. Now the moon was
substantially "below" Saturn and Jupiter. I'd lost my photo! But, I could still
fit all three celestial objects into one photo field with my (now cleaned) 135mm lens. The
earthglow was quite visible and the planets were easy to see. We even got to see Mercury,
but I didn't try to photograph it. Even with my (borrowed) 500mm lens, it would just look
like another star in the dawn sky.
I could, however, turn the 500mm lens on the Moon, Herself. Although the crescent was washed out, the "dark side" of the moon showed up quite nicely! If you look at the larger picture, you can see two short blurs on either side of the moon. Those are stars, and the blur is caused by the apparent motion of the sky while the earth rotated during my exposure. The moon is also blurred, but not so obviously. The only way to get good time exposures of celestial bodies is to have a motor drive that compensates for the celestial motion.
Aware that a lunar eclipse would be gracing Southern California at sunup
in a few weeks, I wanted to try to get some multiple exposure shots of the moon. Each of
these three exposures was 4 seconds long, but the cumulative 12 second exposure of the sky
showed just how much of the sun's light was already striking the upper atmosphere. To the
naked eye the sky was still black--but the lens revealed the truth: the blue sky was
there! If you click on the thumbnail, you can see both Jupiter and Saturn triple exposed
towards the top of the photo.
With the sky getting lighter and lighter, it was time to pack up the
camera & tripod, and fight traffic down the 405 freeway for 45 miles or so. Actually,
at 5:15 AM, traffic moves along on the 405. Justin & I got to Coco's too early--they
weren't open for business yet, so we settled for breakfast at Denny's. Then Justin went
back to bed & I took a shower and headed into work. It turned out to be a LONG day,
but we had a lot of fun together, taking the pictures and watching the sun rise.
Hope you enjoyed sharing our adventure,
10/07/2001
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