Astrophoto: Houston Super Moonrise

While we recently posted a huge batch of images from the recent “Super Moon,” this new image from Sergio Garcia Rill in Houston is something special. It’s a composite photo of the Moonrise on June 22nd, and is a mosaic made from 37 separate images that show the Moon rising over the course of three hours, with the buildings of downtown Houston in the foreground.

“I stayed in place for over three hours,” Sergio explained on Flickr. “The hardest part was selecting which shots showed a sequential movement of the Moon, since I was altering shutter speeds between shots to compensate for changing light conditions.”

The full Moon of June 2013 was at perigee — or at its closest point in its orbit to Earth, and appeared up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons of 2013.

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4 Replies to “Astrophoto: Houston Super Moonrise”

  1. Interesting. That looks like a “reverse” moon illusion, in the sense that the moon in this picture looks bigger away from the horizon than near it. But I know that’s because it is brighter near the upper right and has a halo that makes it look bigger.

  2. The Moon does get bigger the higher in the sky it gets, because the observer is getting closer to it by almost the radius of the Earth when it is highest. Too small an effect to detect visually though I would have thought.

    This sequence disproves forever the myth that the Moon is bigger when near the horizon.

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