They said it would be the brightest and biggest moon visible from Earth since 1948.  So along with countless others I got out my camera and waited for moon rise at 4.33 pm.  I have a wonderful little App on my phone called The Photographer’s Ephemeris which shows where the sun and the moon will be at any place and any time.  So I knew where and when to look for moonrise in Hatton.

4.33 came and went….no moon visible just a bank of cloud over the horizon and light cloud cover above.   Just the same happened in September 2015 when we were promised a lunar eclipse in the early hours of the morning.  Having set the alarm clock, I staggered out to the garden in the wee small hours and saw nothing – cloud cover!   Now it seemed that history had repeated itself.  The best view was supposed to be when the moon was rising.  Then it would appear at its biggest and brightest.   Hatton it seems is not the best place for celestial photography.   I remember the same happened when we were waiting for the solar eclipse in March that same year and again the sky was cloud covered.  All we could see was a faint light struggling to penetrate the sky cover.

But I had the whole night.  Every so often I popped out to look for the moon, and bingo!  at 7.58 pm there it was peeping through the light cloud.   Not the greatest picture of the moon and when the sky did eventually clear enough, not even a very spectacular moon.  Much like any other full moon I had seen before in Hatton.  But they did say that the best pictures would be at moonrise and moonset.

 

I put this down as another moon shot failure until I drew the curtains at 7.00 am.  Clear sky, and there was the moon at last.  I grabbed the camera, and called for Poppy to come with me and we went moon hunting.  At first I thought it had disappeared again behind a bank of cloud, but with the moon so low in the sky I had to wander about to get a good view of the south-western horizon and there it was.

Perhaps not the most dramatic pictures taken that night of the super moon.   But I have my suspicions about some of the pictures posted on facebook anyway.  A few of them look a bit doctored.   I promise that mine are genuine!

By the way, I was not the only one having difficulties seeing the super moon, Jenny reported there was cloud cover in Clackmannanshire and and George in North Carolina had the same problem!