Random Thoughts

Moon When Trees Pop

Posted by Gregg Kemp on March 5th, 2008 — Posted in Pinhole Photography, Shooting the Moon

  Tags: cyanotype, moon, pinhole

The February 20th night of the full moon was a special treat.  It included a total lunar eclipse.   I had built a pinhole camera to give me a full 180° image.  Its actually a single camera that holds three sheets of film in divided compartments.  I had tested the camera only once, using paper negatives, and it checked out OK.  On the evening of the full moon, I set it out on my deck.  Unfortunately, it was a partly cloudy night, and the clouds were rather thick the first few hours.  Then the clouds broke for most of the rest of the evening.  The eclipse started around 8 pm and continued until around midnight.  The eclipse is charted in the second image.  All three pinholes were open the entire night.  The azimuth was almost straight up, so the proper viewing of the prints would be to hold them over your head.

(click on image to see full size)

Sky and camera data for Durham, North Carolina (longitude W78.9, latitude N36.0):

        Wednesday        20 February 2008      Eastern Standard Time
Moonrise                   5:46 p.m.
Sunset                     6:02 p.m.
Open camera                6:20 p.m. 
End civil twilight         6:28 p.m.
Start of Eclipse           8:40 (approximate)
End of Eclipse            12:00 a.m. (approximate) 
Moonset                    7:08 a.m. on following day

Full Moon on 20 February 2008 at 10:31 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

I found this name for the February full moon here.  It credits the Dakotah Sioux for the source.  The most common name is the “snow moon”, but we haven’t seen any snow in Durham, North Carolina lately.  And the name fits the image nicely!