Aim for the moon and if you miss you'll reach the stars is a saying my mum said once. It's a little bit of folksy wisdom that I've often tried to apply in my endeavours, and lately I've started planning something that is literally taking it literally.
The rising and setting of the moon is an event more easily passed by than say the rising or setting of the sun. Manys an evening been spent watching Sol set as well as a few mornings watching it rise but I seem to remember nobody ever really speaking about watching a moonrise and never ever talking about a moonset - except maybe on a few conspiricy websites.
Maybe it's the ficcle nature. I had never seen it myself and despite thinking that I understood the basics of our nearest heavenly body didnt understand how the whole moon-earth arrangement worked. It was only on moving from a built up area to a completely rural one that I began to until I caught it in the picture above last summer of 2019.
So I love a challenge and this oine will be to get a real stonker of a moon set image. I have a few plans and a couple of websites and apps that will come in handy which I'm going to try a write a running account of peicing together what I hope will be a photograph worthy of exhibiting.
I recently saw a picture on a facebook group page where a photographer had managed to get the rising moon behing Gally Head Lighthouse here in West Cork. The picture was very good and had the mark of exceptionaly good planning. So a little science:
If you consider how a full moonrise only happens 12 times a year and each one of those needs to be clear to the horizon for it to be seen meaning that you need to be at an elevation higher than the suroundings and that the sky needs to be clear it becomes clear that its rather an unusual event.