Given all the recent hype about super, blue, reddish moon I wondered about having a go at photographing it. Also wondered if it would be possible to sneak it in as an observation on iSpot.
So last night set up equipment and waited for moon to be somewhat behind a tree about 30m away so could get silhouette of leaves and shoots etc for ID. Unfortunately as the first two photos show you can either get the moon or the tree in focus but not both (it is a Turkish hazel tree by the way but would have needed better photos anyway)
So gave up on the idea of an iSpot observation and instead wondered if those photos you see in the media of this super moon with a plane in front are real or just superimposed in photoshop. How to check that? Well I am used to waiting ages for a bit of wildlife to turn up or not so just set up the equipment and wait for a plane.
However the moon takes up just a tiny fraction of the sky and planes also only take up a tiny fraction of the sky so what are the chances of a plane actually flying in front or should I just give up and do the lottery for a better chance of success.
Remarkably after about 40mins of waiting (much less than normal for wildlife photography) in the dark the image below happened, don’t know if the image compression will damage the image too much but if not then you can even see the disruption in the air caused by the jet engines across the face of the moon.
I saw a very red moon a couple of nights ago. But I didn’t take a photo.
Presumably the tree is comparatively close and the depth of focus is not that great if you are using a very wide aperture. The plane is, effectively, at infinity. Brilliant photo!
Airliner cruising altitude is 6-8 miles (but in Britain a lot of planes in view may be in the ascent or descent phases of flight), while you can see planes at distances considerable greater than that. Geometry means that more planes are in view near to the horizon (which is were supermoons are photographed) that at the zenith. The relevant number is also the area covered by a plane’s path over the duration of interest, which is liable to be much larger than the area covered by a plane at any particular instant. I’ve no idea what the actual odds are, but they’re probably better than a naive expectation.
For a plane to be this big against the moon it had to be much lower than cruising altitude. I did think that a cruising altitude plane would have been interesting, being so small would have made the moon appear even bigger. However I was monitoring (can usually see the flashing lights) that whole area of sky for the time and there were only a couple of other planes anywhere near the moon and they were still quite a few degrees away. The moon might seem big but it only covers half a degree of the sky.
