<![CDATA[Moon of the Austral Sky]]>

When visiting southern latitudes nothing disorients a northern hemisphere astronomer more than seeing our familiar Moon turned “the wrong way!”

With the Moon now dominating the night sky, my photo attention in Australia turns to it as my celestial subject.

It’s wonderful to see the Moon as a crescent phase in the evening sky, but now flipped around so it looks like the Moon we see from home up north when it is a waning crescent in the morning.

However, the lead image above actually shows the waxing crescent in the evening. It shines above the volcanic hills near Warrumbungles National Park, with the added silhouette of the dome of the Australian Astronomical Telescope, the largest optical telescope in Australia.

After a lifetime of seeing the Moon in its northerly orientation, seeing the austral Moon throws off your sense of time and direction. Are we looking west in the evening? Or east in the morning? The Moon just doesn’t make sense!

This is a two-exposure composite: a long exposure for the sky and ocean, and a short exposure for the disk of the Moon itself, to preserve some detail in the disk, specifically the mare areas to show the face of the Moon and not an overexposed white disk. Both with the 135mm telephoto and Canon 6D, from Woolgoolga, NSW.

Then there’s the Full Moon. It rises in the east, as does the Sun. But like the Sun, the “down under Moon” moves from right to left across the northern, not southern sky. And the familiar “Man in the Moon” figure is upside down, as seen above.

The photo above is from Friday night, and shows the Full Moon rising in the northeast over the Pacific Ocean.

The apogee Full Moon of April 22, 2016 rising over the Pacific Ocean and lighting the waters with a golden glitter path of reflected moonlight. I shot this from the Woolgoolga Headlands viewpoint, with the 135mm telephoto and Canon 6D. This is a high dynamic range stack of 5 exposures to compress the range in brightness. Even so, the Moon itself is still overexposed.

This “HDR” image above from earlier in the evening captures the golden glitter path of moonlight on the ocean waves. I photographed these Full Moon scenes from the Headlands viewpoint at Woolgoolga, a great spot for panoramic seascapes.

The Full Moon this night was the apogee Full Moon of 2016 – the smallest and most distant Full Moon of the year, the opposite of a “supermoon.”

This is a high dynamic range stack of 7 exposures to preserve the range in brightness between the bright sky and Moon, and the dark ground in the dim twilight.

Earlier in the week I was inland, high on the New England Tablelands in New South Wales. This image shows the waxing gibbous Moon in the evening twilight over Ebor Falls on the Guy Fawkes River, one of the few waterfalls on the famed Waterfall Way in New Soith Wales that has water flowing year round.