The Trees Look Up

In about a week
the Moon returns to the west
by disappearing

a few days from now
in the east into the dawn.
Someone can know this

by watching the Moon
travel eastward every night
or by looking at

the annotations
on any good calendar.
If the Moon looks down

I’d rather the Moon
saw me looking up at her.
Even if the Moon

never looked at me
I’d rather look at the Moon
than a calendar.

If The Moon Looks Down

Today the Moon, now 92% illuminated, has moved over to Jupiter and the two are only about six degrees apart. However it is cloudy here.

I was going to skip trying to get a photograph, but when I looked outside I saw that the clouds were moving quickly and alternating between thick and thin. So I thought I’d give it a shot and see what kind of photos I could get.

I wanted to get something in the foreground to make the scene kind of a landscape with a backdrop of the sky, but with the illumination constantly changing from the shifting clouds I didn’t have a lot of choices. Also it’s a little cold outside. And my main priority was to get an exposure that included Jupiter. I ending up taking about half a dozen pics, but I wasn’t happy with too many of them. Here are a couple that I cropped a little and fiddled with a little and like a little.

The Moon is so bright and the clouds catch and spread the light so effectively that it was hard to get definition of the Moon and still show Jupiter below and the trees down to the left. I don’t own Photoshop and I don’t want to start doing selective dodging and burning so I’ve limited myself to fiddling with overall picture values. This isn’t a great shot, but it does show the Moon, Jupiter and a few tree branches.

I’ve pushed around the mid-range values quite a bit in this next image. This is closer to what the scene visually looked like. I like the lunar halo shining on the clouds, but I would have liked more definition to the Moon itself, and I wish the clouds had been thinner over Jupiter so the planet would have stood out more below the Moon.

I’m glad I got this image. This is how I’ll remember this cycle of the Moon starting near Venus and pushing across the sky to Jupiter.

The trees were looking up, watching.

I was looking up, too.

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Selene Still Loves Endymion


Looking Away From Selene And Endymion


Endymion Still Loves Selene