Nighttime Photos from the Back Stoop

Sunday Evening: tennis is on. It's gets dark outside earlier now because because Ole Sol* is heading back south to the equator and beyond. I chance to look toward the patio door and spy a very orange half moon — half+ really, which can be called a gibbous  moon. My camera is nearby with my longest lens attached, so at the first opportunity at a break in the match, I venture onto the back stoop and snap a photo.

Nice detail, and that was the genuine colour, due to the smoke.

I had never previously taken a no -tripod, hand-held lunar photo, and while it is very far from recommended practice, I just wanted a photo for the blog. I increased the ISO and set the shutter speed high for hand-holding, and then I clicked.

Despite using my longest lens, the moon was small in the image, so I cropped a lot. At that high ISO, the photo would also be noisy, but that is the compromise with shooting the way that I did.

Fortunately, software has come a long way. It allowed me to upscale the cropped photo while still decreasing the noise and even increasing the sharpness. As one can see, I was able to get pretty good detail under the circumstances, and that pleases me.

At the same time, while out on the stoop, we decided to try to get a photo of the spider and her web. You may recall that it is hanging in the seeming middle of nowhere and that we couldn't even see the web when I showed you  a daytime photo a little while ago.

Well, by shining a light, the web showed up brilliantly against the darkness. I held the light and Sue was able to get a pretty good picture with her phone. The spider herself was sitting in the middle of the web. She was over-exposed, but the web showed up very well. 

Isn't this impressive: a beautiful and intricate feat of engineering
almost hanging in the middle of nowhere?

* I looked up Sol to see if I was a correct way to refer to the sun. I found this from someone who used the handle, svarogteuse. It is acceptable usage in the more poetic sense.

The Sun is called the Sun in English. Sol is used in other languages and in poetic senses, but in English scientific literature the preferred term is The Sun according to the IAU.