Call it what you want, be it the full Moon, Super Moon, Hunter’s Moon, Travel Moon, Dying Grass Moon, or the Sanguine Blood Moon, I saw it tonight as it rose out of the clouds above House Island in Casco Bay, just off the coast of Portland, Maine.
Technically, a Super Moon is a full moon which occurs when its at apogee, or closest to the Earth in its orbit. When that happens, it looks ever so slightly larger on the horizon when it rises. That girth can be accentuated by photographing it with a telephoto lens, as I’ve done here. Telephoto lenses compress the perceived distance between objects, making the moon look closer to whatever its rising up behind.
What made tonight’s Super Moon so cool was that rose at sunset, making it really fun to photograph. A full Moon is basically as bright as daylight and when you photograph it at night, the rest of the world just goes black. To get detail in both the Moon and the landscape, it has to rise when there’s still twilight falling on terrestrial objects in the foreground — like it did tonight.
