These two images were taken a few minutes apart, but have different moods.
Thin Crescent Moon
Daytime Moon
Half moon over the shoreline of Whidbey Island.
Climbing to the Moon
This is along the High Divide, the ridge that runs just north of the Hoh River across from Mt Olympus in Olympic National Park. A little hard to see the moon … but it’s there.
13 Percent Waning Moon
The very thin crescent waxing moon sets just after sunset, but the thin waning moon rises before dawn. I don’t have as many shots, since I have to drive for a while before I have a view. On February 21st, I drove to where I had a view … but a thin cloud layer made the moon hard to focus on … and hard to pick out of the haze. (It’s at the top in the middle) I used binoculars to spot the moon as it rose above the Cascades and Puget Sound. Just lucky with the shipping traffic.
- Camera: Nikon D850
- Lens: Nikkor 80-400mm with 2x adapter for 800mm
- ISO 3200 1/160 sec f/11.0
Port Townsend Ferry
This is the ferry Kennewick leaving Port Townsend on its last trip of the day to Coupeville on Sunday May 5th. I was across the bay at Fort Flagler State Park, to try and get a photo of the very new moon. (see below) There is a tiny bit of jet contrail above the hill. Just after this, I spotted (with my binoculars) a much higher contrail that was glowing red in the sunset. I couldn’t find it with the camera, though. And it would have just been a red smudge. But it was very cool looking.
I couldn’t see the moon without using the binoculars, either. This image was right after I first spotted it … about 9 PM (it set at behind the trees at 9:25 or so). It was 8.6% waxing at this point. It needs to get to be 11% or so before you have much chance to spot it with your naked eyes.
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my cable release – remote. So I used the timer … but that still left me with mirror bounce. With the cable release, I can use the mirror up mode and eliminate the bounce. There were some high clouds … that’s the few horizontal streaks you can see.
Both images are with my Nikon D850 and 80-400mm with the zoom set at 400mm. With the moon shot, I added a Nikon 2x teleconverter… and still cropped a bunch to eliminate all the extraneous sky.
