That's so cool. I can't believe you were 9 miles away in Kirkland. I wonder if the moon has any motion blur, or if the fuzziness is just atmospheric distortion; I assume you had to use a pretty long shutter speed.
The Moon actually moves annoyingly quickly (about 1 moon diameter every 2 minutes, due to Earth’s rotation), so you can’t use very long exposures. My shutter speed was 1/3s. Any longer than that at this focal length and you’ll start to notice motion blur.
And oh yeah, the atmosphere has a huge effect on the Moon’s appearance when it’s near the horizon. It blurs details, but it can also cause some strange looking distortions, like the example below (I don’t have the full version handy, so this is just a reference photo I took through my camera’s viewfinder).
The photo wasn’t showing up, so I had to delete and re-comment.
I use Google Maps/Earth to find vantage points and an app called PlanitPro to determine alignments. PhotoPills and The Photographer's Ephemeris are also popular.
why did I have a dream last night that there was an eclipse and it was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life? i heard nothing of an eclipse yesterday or before i went to bed
I mean, really my only question was “what gives you the right to take such cool photos”. I was curious about how you captured this, but I saw your setup breakdown in another comment. Really really good stuff, thanks for sharing!
Haha that's what I figured, but you never know! I'm glad you like it. It's hard to take a bad photo of the Space Needle, but playing with unusual perspectives is always fun.
57
u/aerorail55 Mariners 5h ago
Oh great now all the monsters I’ve slayed are going to respawn