Orange Super Blue Moon Rising

We interrupt our traipsing through past Worldcon trips to bring you today’s “Blue Supermoon” rising!

You couldn’t possibly have missed all of the hype. But the short (and factual) description is that tonight the Moon was full (happens every 29.5 days, more or less), it was a tiny percentage closer to Earth than average (its orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, so sometimes it’s a bit closer, sometimes it’s a bit farther away, perfectly normal and routine) which means it was a tiny percentage brighter than average, and it was the second full moon in a calendar month (which happens on average every couple of years because our calendar is weird and irregular and lumpy), and tonight all three of those things happened more or less simultaneously. The press had a field day.

First of all, the camera (and hidden image processing software) in the iPhone 13 doesn’t quite know what to do with an bright orange super blue Moon on a dark-ish, dusk-ish background. It does its best.

The good news is that it did better this time on focusing on the Moon instead of the telephone pole and trees. Not great, mind you, but better.

The good camera (Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a 300mm Tamron lens) is lousy in full auto mode being even older and more computationally primitive than the iPhone. But put it in manual mode and shoot a series of pictures with varying exposures and manually focusing, then something in that series is going to get close.

This is a LOT like what it looked like in terms of color and contrast. And yes, just coming up through the turbulent, hot, pea soup atmosphere over downtown Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley it does look that distorted and misshapen.

As it gets up a bit and we’re not viewing it through quite so much icky atmosphere, the Moon rounds up and starts to get bright. Like really, really bright.

Which confuses the crap out of the camera, which sees all of that black and wants to do a 1/2 or 3/4 second exposure. Knowing (a little bit) better, I overrode it for a 1/250 second exposure. Still too bright! Should have gone for 1/1000 second. Or shorter.

The iPhone never gets over that and constantly overexposes the scene. But it does a decent job of catching the city spread out down below.

Now that it’s way up overhead, even a 1/1000 second exposure would be way, way too long. I don’t think my older (13 years? 15 years?) DSLR will do an exposure short enough to show detail on any full moon, not just a super duper blue Moon. Not without going to some sort of neutral density filter to cut down on the light.

Regolith is reflective as all get out, especially for just vacuum cured grey dust and pulverized rock!