Blood Moon

A week ago, many parts of the world had an astronomical trifecta -- the sun, moon and our green planet were aligned on the same axis for the year's first -- and only -- total lunar eclipse, also referred to as the "super wolf blood moon." 

The bloody colour was clearly spectacular at night, but given the film cameras I use, I decided to capture a few moments from the “morning after”.

Here is the moon descending behind the mountain range at sunrise:

And here it is just when it touched the top of the Butte:

I took this shot from my street to show the size scale of the city lights compared to the moon.

January 26, 2019

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019

Ziggy Stardust

A few days ago the moon was perfectly round and very large. At night one could read poetry.

I wanted to capture the sky early in the morning when the moon “descends” behind the mountain range line. I also wanted to do it with a 1969 Nikon F and a same year Nikkor-Q  180mm telephoto lens wide open at f4 with a shutter speed of 1/15^th second.

The moonlight was so strong that I wanted to avoid all belief that this was a daytime photo using a red filter or so. Therefore, I made sure to capture the house light on the side of the mountain at the bottom of the frame.

…And I could not recall the words by David Bowie  in his 1972 song "Moonage Daydream" from the album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.  

The lyrics are:

 “keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe / put your ray gun to my head / press your space face close to mine, love / freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah.”

January 5, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019