Caught between the rooftops and an advancing blanket of cloud, Sunday’s Harvest Moon managed to reveal itself for a few brief moments as it rose into the sky. Taking place around the time of the autumnal equinox, the Harvest Moon is unique because it rises 30 rather than 50 minutes later each successive evening.

This happens because the path of the Moon on the ecliptic forms a narrow angle with respect to the horizon. An occurrence which results in shorter rising times with no period of darkness between Sunsets and Moonrises. In times long past this helped farmers, as they could work for much longer, when it became time to gather in their crops. Hence the name of this full Moon.

Harvest Moon Rising 04.10.09: Mouseover the image for a close-up.

The offhand shot above, a 1/40 second exposure, was taken at a focal length of 70mm using an f/stop of 5.6 and an ISO of 100. The image was then processed using a combination of Apple’s Aperture and the open source image editor GIMP.

Tags: Autumnal Equinox, DSLR, Harvest Moon, Moon

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Astrophotography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.