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November's Sunset Moon Rise is Tonight

With only 12-13 full moon dates each year, I like planning ahead to catch the moon rising at sunset and setting at sunrise.  In addition to the full moon setting at sunrise tomorrow, the nearly-full moon will rise just before sunset tonight.  This timing is useful in landscape photography because you can catch some color in the rising and setting moon, but you can also catch the landscape lit well enough to balance the moon and landscape exposures.  In other words, as the moon brightens and the landscape darkens, you'll enjoy a few minutes where you have the opportunity to catch the moon with detail over the landscape (not simply as a blown out white disk).

Here are a couple of blog posts I've written on the topic;
Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2010/03/anticipating-sun-and-moon-position.html
Plan Ahead for Great Full Moon Rise and Set Shots!
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2006/11/plan-ahead-for-great-full-moon-rise-and.html

The image below is the full moon setting during a lunar eclipse just before dawn at Mono Lake, much like it will tomorrow morning for observers in the Western U.S. (weather permitting).  I had hoped to catch the moon rising and setting here tonight as my back-up plan when my first choices clouded over, but our skies are looking pretty cloudy here as well, and the forecast is not promising.

Lunar eclipse moon set over Mono Lake

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70 thoughts on “November's Sunset Moon Rise is Tonight”

  9. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    This is a "blue hour" shot before sunrise +Kevin Cook, where the approaching light of the approaching sun is behind the camera, so there's light on the side of the tufa rock formations facing the camera, even though the moon is setting.  Mono Lake is great that way… the basin is about 20 miles across, so the light from the approaching sun enables photography an hour or more ahead of the actual rise of the sun.

  11. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    +Charles Lupica As that second blog article describes, the app +The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) not only shows you accurate sun and moon rise times for any given location on a Google Earth map, but it also shows the suna dn moon directions for any time of day as we.., so you can adjust your shooting position to put the moon next to a natural or man-made landmark.  TPE is free for Macs and PCs.  
    One of my coolest anticipated alignments I've pulled off so far was positioning my camera ahead of time to have last December's lunar eclipse pass directly behind the tip of the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco for a time-lapse video, as described on
    +Philip Plait's Discover Magazine +Bad Astronomy blog : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/12/12/lunar-eclipse-time-lapse/

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