A day before a new moon it rises just before the sun. We had a clear morning for this double rise yesterday and I went out to shoot a time lapse video of it.
The Earth’s schedule of rotation around the sun and the Moon’s schedule of rotation around Earth do not play well together and bear no simple relationship to one another. It is unlikely we’ll ever have metric time measurement because the length of days, months and years just don’t fit together in a count-on-your-fingers kind of way. This constant variation means each of these little coincidental scheduling line ups is unique.
On this particular morning the moon rose about an hour ahead of the sun and it was about 6% of its full size which is a little larger than usual. This gives the moon enough time to rise several degrees in to the sky before fading from view in the light of sunrise.
I thought it would make a cool time lapse. Next time I try this, I’m going to go with a larger focal length to increase the visual size of the moon. The challenge is maintaining some foreground interest that’s in focus.
Click HD to see and hear the best version.
Music is “Summer Days” by Kai Engel from freemusicarchive.com
The duck population of Hoover reservoir has no respect for time lapse photography. One in particular seemed to have open contempt for my efforts <grin>. Just as the sun rose over the trees, she swam right in front of the camera and mooned it… twice.