Lunar Lunacy

You're not going to believe this, but I have another moon photo although I sure didn't intend to do another lunar shoot. 

I went to bed at 10, Monday night and fell right asleep. But I woke up just an hour later at 11 in a furnace-like heat. No sweat but felt like I might blow up. This was most distressing after two nights that didn't total 8 hours combined.

Moving from my bed to my chair didn't help, for even as the heat began to subside, my various aches and pains took the opportunity to increase my misery.

After a time, I went downstairs. If memory serves, I had a piece of toast, for I sometimes notice that eating a little something changes my mindset, or something like that.

I stepped outside, and what did I see?

Behold, I saw the almost crescent moon with Venus off to the right. Venus being the little dot toward the top right of the frame, above.

It was almost midnight, but I started hauling my camera equipment out. Alas, I could capture the moon, but I couldn't see Venus in my photos.

After awhile, I realized that I had to make a composite photo. I photographed the moon at 1/60th of a second, but I couldn't really see Venus in the screen until I had reduced the shutter speed to 0.8th of a second, which is about 6x the light that I required for the moon. I composited the two images in Photoshop. They are the sizes that the camera captured, and they were that far apart.

The result was okay for this unexpected encounter in the middle of a sleepless night. I learned something too, for I had never realized that you couldn't capture the moon and another object like this with one exposure. So, whenever you see a photo like this in future, you'll know that some post production work was necessary. It's not faking it but rather is going to great lengths to capture the scene as it was. Good photography is so often more than a click of a button.

Before I go, I will harken back to the previous lunar photos — the Blue Supermoon ones. One of them got Explored (ie featured) on Flickr and got almost 4000 views and well over  200 faves.

It was this ↓ one, but it was the the first version that I originally showed you – the one before I removed the lampposts and lights: 

The Flickr version didn't have the reflection either, but when Barb bemoaned the lack of a reflection, I decided to do some Photoshopping. You see, although there was no reflection in this original photo, I did have one from a slightly different location, off to the left of this one. So, I grabbed the reflection from that photo and pasted it into this one. I probably should have enlarged the reflection to match the size of the moon better, but I decided to let the project rest. I have learned from both lunar shoots, and that is good enough for now.