Once in a Blue Moon....there is a Supermoon and Eclipse

The modern definition of a blue moon (though not the first definition) is 2 full moons in one month.   One happened January 31st, 2018, another will happen in March 2018 and then it will be 2020 and 2023 for the next ones.

A supermoon is when the Moon is the closest to the Earth based on its orbit.  A full supermoon happens 3-4 times a year.  A supermoon happened to fall on January 31st, 2018.

And to top it off there was a lunar eclipse on January 31st, 2018 too.   The moon set on the East coast before the eclipse really got going, but it was an impressive night for the moon.

I found a Forbes article that showed the odds of a supermoon, bluemoon, and eclipse all on the same night.

With all that, we can combine this information to arrive at how frequently we expect all of these to occur together:

• Blue Moons make up about 3% of all full Moons,

• Supermoons are approximately 25% of all full Moons, and

• Total lunar eclipses occur during 5.6% of full Moons,

meaning that a Blue, Super, totally eclipsed Moon occurs with 0.042% of full Moons: once every 2,380 full Moons or so. On average, that corresponds to once every 265 years!

The full article can be found here:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/01/24/how-rare-is-the-all-in-one-supermoon-blue-moon-and-lunar-eclipse-really/#10bc7c843cf2

So since it is a fairly rare event I did not want to miss the photo op.  In reality a full moon is my least favorite to photograph because you don't get the sun contrast an a part of the moon that will show the craters really well.   However I used the opportunity to play around with photo stacks and HDR processing.  

HDR Moon

HDR stands for high dynamic range.   Creating an HDR photo starts with taking multiple exposures of a target in which you have at least a normal photo, an overexposed photo, and an underexposed photo.  Then you combine those photos together to an HDR photo where shadows are much more impressive.  HDR has become very popular and many phone now will do all these steps for you and give you an HDR photo automatically.  Of course I still think taking each photo and stacking them creates the best HDR images.

Here is a stack of 3 moon photos that were normal, under and over exposed.

Stacks

Since I had a large number of photos you can also stack them all and get more detail.  There is a lot of software out there that can help you with this, but I used Affinity as a one stop shop to combine the images. 

Using 1 RAW photo

DSLR cameras take RAW photos and it is pretty amazing the amount of detail you can pull out of one photo.  RAW is just a format in which the picture was minimally processes by the camera.  You have the most basic "raw" image.  This give you a lot of flexibility in doing your own processing.  With just 1 raw photo i could pull a lot of detail out of a moon shot.  

If you take photos and want to play around with stacks and HDR I would highly recommend software called Affinity.  I love photoshop, but it has become fairly expensive in my mind.  I am not a huge fan of the subscription service.   Affinity is a photoshop like software that you can buy for fairly cheap and you own it.   I am slowly switching all my normal photo processing to this software.  

The link to the website is:  https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

You can also buy a nice book that helps you become even proficient in the software.