Path of the Harvest Moon

I photographed the moon on 15th September 2016. It was the day before the Harvest moon, a full moon nearest the Autumnal Equinox. Plus it was in partial eclipse in certain regions around the world and it would have been quite red in colour. This was a lovely pale orange, getting brighter as it was rising into the night sky. I dug out an old 70-200mm lens, a second-hand one bought a few years back. Can’t afford a new one. But it serves its purpose once in a while. I will be digging it out again for the Super Moon on the 14th November.

My main aims was to track the path, out of over 200 hundred frames I could only manage four for this final image. I used an intervelometer and set up the camera on my tripod and allowed a 10 second interval between each shot. This took well over half an hour.

For the final image I used Adobe camera bridge and opened up the files in JPEG format (after I tweaked them in Lightroom) and then opened them up as layers in CS6. I selected the first layer and then reduced the opacity on the right hand side to help deselect the layers i did not require; then I used layer mask on the first image, using the brush tool at 100% Opacity to bring out the layer visible underneath. Remembering to return the opacity to 100% on the right hand side panel. I then merged down the new visible layer, and repeated the process until I was satisfied

I further edited into Colour FX pro 4 to help bring out the detail in using the detail enhancer. I saved it back into CS6 and used high pass filter to sharpen. Opened up the new image in Lightroom to further reduce noise around the moons.using the brush tool.

Thank you for popping into my blog today; however here is a wee video on my Facebook Page created from 150 frames tracking the path of the moon. Select HD on the settings icon. Note we had limited software to produce the final motion picture 😉