Super moon!

The perigee moon (also called a super moon) is made not of green cheese but Brie de Nangis, which is best enjoyed with an oven-fresh baguette, caviar and Dom Perignon.

Just kidding – it’s that same old hunk of rock that’s gotten a bad rap for everything from making lovers lose their good sense to causing earthquakes. Only this time it just passed closer to the earth than it will again until November, 2016.

That being the case I thought, why not try to get a decent photo of it – since last time I tried to shoot the moon (during the near-total lunar eclipse) clouds swooped in and ruined everything. So I set up the tripod on the deck and waited until the moon cleared low-altitude atmospheric haze and then pounced.

Nothing really unusual in this shot of the full moon with full-frontal lighting. It’s actually more interesting in a partial phase, with mountains and craters visible and light raking in from the side, but such is life. Perigee moons are special because they’re (just barely) larger to the naked eye, and consequently make a (slightly) higher resolution target to photograph.

So without further ado – our celestial mascot, the Moon:

For those interested in such things, here’s the technical data:

Camera: Nikon D300
Lens: 300mm ED (manual focus, relatively ancient)
ISO: 250
Aperture: f11 (I think – I was working by feel and xif data didn’t properly read from the manual lens)
Exposure: 1/25
Exposure mode: manual
File type: JPG
Color space: sRGB
White balance: auto
Saturation, etc: normal
Size: 4288 x 2848 pixels (but seriously cropped…)
Time: 8:24 pm EDT, March 19

Tripod-mounted (duh!), remotely triggered with mirror-up shutter release.