Photo Trip - Coast Road, Dec 22, 2006
The moon was a slender waxing cresent in Sagittarius. I hoped to photograph it with a selection of exposure times hopefully getting background stars and doing a high dynamic range compression in Photoshop. Then photograph the Elephant Trunk Nebula in Cepheus, and if the weather and my energy held out, then do M43 in Orion. However, I only got set up in time to get the moon a few degrees above the horizon, and one shot worth keeping. Then, some yokel drove by and shooed me away - "private property" etc. I saw cirrus clouds coming in from the north, and so... that was that.
The 7+ cresent moon through the 8" f/4 LXD75, untracked for 44 seconds. Midway through the exposure the 7.8 magnitude star at the top was occulted. It's only 2 degrees above the ocean horizon. The atmospheric flattening and reddening arepretty apparent. The moon is saturating some pixels, and a reflection off the corrector plate is at lower left. Strong unsharp masking, a bit of color saturation and no cropping in Photoshop CS2. Click for a full size image. |
