I drove out to Graham, WA today to take a test shot of Mt. Rainier and the moon. Over the next few days, as we head toward full moon, the moon will rise a little later each day, and a little closer to the mountain.
In the shot above, the moon is about 16º above the horizon, which suggests that the vertical arc subtended by the mountain is quite small. I’m guess it’s just 3-4º. So even though the moon is fairly low in the sky, it’s still well above the mountain.
I have software on my iPad that predicts these things, and it looks like I can get good shots on Wednesday and Thursday, late afternoon/early evening, with the moon much closer to Mt. Rainier. On Wednesday, the moon will rise just to the left of the mountain, and move diagonally along the slope.
On Thursday, the moonrise will be behind the mountain from that location, and the moon will appear from the right flank of the mountain, which would offer some interesting possibilities.
This was a test, and only a test; the real action comes in a few days.
Shot with the Zeiss Otus 100mm lens at f/4. I took seven photographs and assembled them into a single panorama. The image is large enough to nearly fill a wall if printed at full size.
Since we are far north in Seattle, a little more than halfway to the north pole, the summer moon has an arc in the sky like the winter sun: very low. It rises south of east, and sets south of west. This creates the nice low-moon situation I want to photograph.