Once in a Blue Moon

This month is one of those rarer times when a full Moon can be seen twice in the same month. The phrase 'Once in a Blue Moon' appertains to its rarity rather than the colour of the Moon. On average, there will be 41 months that have two Full Moons in every century. The next full Moon is on Thursday, New Year's Eve.

After my previous session where I finally managed to photograph some features on the Moon's surface I decided to see how the Panasonic camcorder would cope at night. Its 70x optical zoom helped to get close in. In fact I didn't need the full 70x. There was a faint halo which the camcorder didn't pick up but you can see the thin cloud which was zooming across the Moon. I did find out why telescopes need to be motorised to track heavenly bodies. Even in the short time this video clip was taken you can see the Moon drift across the screen with the motion of the Earth so I had to adjust the camcorder to bring the Moon back to the centre of the shot.



Today as I was topping up the feeders just before it got dark I noticed the Moon was showing clearly so I fixed the Sigma 170-500mm lens on the 50D and used a hefty tripod to see what I could see.

This is the untouched full photo: ISO 800 1/400 sec @ f8 zoom is just off the full 500mm ...



... and here a different clipped shot with the colour changed to grey scale.



Well - that's got that out of my system so with luck we will be back to photos of our feathered visitors next time.