'I'm always looking for the Hows and the Whys and the Whats,' said Muskrat, 'That is why I speak as I do. You've heard of Muskrat's Much-in-Little, of course?'
'No,' said the child. 'What is it?'
- The Mouse and his Child. Russell Hoban.

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Friday 12 December 2008

Sundown and moonup


A nice sunset tonight.  The flax bush silhouetted against the western sky at 8.50 tonight:


But when I turned around to go inside I spotted this:


And a few minutes later, with the telephoto lens, it looked like this:

11 comments:

  1. Photo #1.

    WWWWoooowwwwwww.

    Lovely. The colors, the colors...

    Very nice.

    JIm (Utah)

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  2. That big white ball in the sky is known as the moon or in French (thinking about your fancy surname) la lune!

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  3. Awesome photo! Last night the moon was the closest it's been the whole year. NASA says: "14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons."

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  4. Lovely, but as with your pic of Saturn & Venus the other day, I couldn't go out & attempt to replicate it as we're under a blanket of (very wet)cloud right now....

    They say that the moon's about as close to the Earth as it gets, some 17,000 miles nearer than average, tonight, but I still can't see it!

    Bloomin' Northern Hemisphere.

    Brr, British winter. Hmmph.

    James

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  5. Jim, thank you.
    YP, I guessed almost immediately it was the moon.
    James, that explains why I had to take a double exposure and push that of the moon back a lot in order to see the details. It was indeed very bright! Thanks for the information.

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  6. (Hmmm what a lot of James's today!)
    Gypsy James, what can I say? Warm yourself vicariously by my blog.

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  7. I particularly like the last photo mainly black with the moon shining brightly - very nice indeed. I sometimes imagine what is would be like to live in a world where there was more than one moon. Imagine going outside and seeing 5 moons, all different colours and sizes!

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  8. I thought of that idea recently too Alden, and tried to describe the idea to my class. We were talking about the scenario of humans having to move off the Earth when the sun gets hotter (in a few hundred million years). It also developed into a great discussion re. 'Terraforming' Mars to make it habitable.

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  9. I heard that fact about the moon being nearer than usual too, although the out of scale picture on the news purporting to come from NASA only went to fuel the suspicion that the moon landings took place in a hollywood sound stage, and the considerable depth of atlantic depression cloud cover above the british isles meant the bloody thing could have been near enough to evesdrop the clangers and still be unseen

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  10. Beautifully captured.

    I think it cool that I stood outside last night looking at the gorgeous moon that you'd already taken pictures of and I didn't even know it.

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  11. Lovely photo - I saw the huge moon and wondered why it looked so big.

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