On the morning of the Wolf Moon, I was sound asleep at 6am until a text message buzzed in from a friend. The message? It said "get down to the beach NOW with your camera, full moon setting". The majority of my brain was still in a fog but the section labeled "photo opp" jolted awake. I grabbed my camera bag and five minutes later trudged down to the beach in shorts, t-shirt and flip flops with morning hair all askew. I got there in time to see a big, bright slightly orange-tinged moon setting into the calm ocean amid a thin smudge of low clouds. In less than ten minutes the moon had gone from high and bright to good-bye and gone. Sorry to say, no decent pictures were taken. I went back to the condo, put away my camera and took a nap. I'd try again another day.
Being somewhat intelligent I figured that if the moon was full the night before and it set the night before then it'd still look full and would set again 24 hours later, right? I optimistically set my alarm for 5:45am. Did I forget to mention it was very cloudy and rainy when I went to sleep? It was very cloudy and rainy when the alarm went off, too. No moon in sight. And so.....I went back to sleep.
Apply the aforementioned train of thought once again except with a 48 hour delay from Day One. When I awoke before the crack of dawn on this particular morning the sky was crystal clear and the moon shone intensely bright. Score! Woohoo, I was finally going to photograph the moon-set!
Maybe not. The photo you see above is the result of two things. #1--Me not paying attention in science class or astronomy class to comprehend the moon's irrational pattern night to night. This became highly evident when the moon showed no sign of giving up it's position in the sky as I thought it should when the sun was rising. #2--It was 6am. I was on vacation and awake when I'd rather be sleeping and by golly I was going to take pictures of that moon, regardless of the results.
The picture turned out okay. The light down the middle of the ocean and on the wave in the forefront was the moonlight reflecting off the water. The rising sun was lighting up the clouds to the left of the moon. After being on the beach for over a half hour the moon only moved from the 1 o'clock position to where it's seen in the picture. Wolf Moon, brightest moon of 2010 and beautiful even though I was two days late! Stubborn moon. Just doesn't know when to quit. Apparently neither do I.
