Moon Shots

I was looking at a 1980 Susan B. Anthony dollar earlier today, admiring the neat design those much-maligned coins have on the reverse side. It's of a huge eagle, carrying an olive branch in its claws as it lands on the moon. The Earth is in the sky behind and above it. You may recall that the LEM in which Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon was nicknamed Eagle. Hence the famous quote, "The Eagle has landed."

Then I spent the coin, so I can't show it to you now.

I tried very hard to get you some good pictures of this month's full moon, the so-called Wolf Moon, preferably just over the Rincon mountains at moonrise. I'm sorry to report that the camera, my technical skills, Tucson topography and atmospheric conditions (clouds and haze) all got in the way of doing the job well. But I played around with the pictures anyway with my free photo editing software. Let me show you what I came up with.



I took this one right after sunset, looking west across the grounds of a local school. I've cropped and darkened the photo a bit to make it more dramatic and give the moon more visible features. The haze hadn't quite obiterated the moon's details at that point. This would soon change.


This tree was also on school property, but I cropped the fence out of the picture. Again, the image has been darkened for effect.



I actually took this one while waiting to make a U-turn on Golf Links. It's been cropped and (you guessed it!) darkened.

By the time I took this picture a few minutes later, the moon was definitely enveloped in haze. This is how the shot looks without any edits other than resizing.

And here's my edit of the same photo.


Close up on one of the later photos, again darkened. You can see a jet trail crossing the moon. The halo is partly from the haze, I assume, but the bit on the upper left is probably due to my inability to keep the camera perfectly still. I don't even own a tripod.

That's it for now, folks!

Karen