Sunday, March 20, 2011

Saturday's Supermoon Surprise


Most certainly it was biggest at a certain time in Singapore... 11:00PM or so but the time I realized and looked up into the night sky, the moon was as bright as I could remember but I could not say it was the biggest I had seen.

This morning, the report says that it was suppose to be about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than any other given day, or years... about 18 years once when it was at its closest to earth last night.

We were busy watching TV when Sonny burst out from his room, reminding us of the rare event. He took out my Canon camera to capture the phenomenon but was having trouble with the settings.

That was when I helped him and became interested in it and got involved to catch that celestial moment with him. So father and son, both with a Canon D450 dSLR and a Lumix FX10 respectively, were busy taking turns out of the master bedroom window, clicking away, taking pictures of the heavenly satellite.

Lots of clicking... trying all kinds of settings to get those details we normally see, so effortlessly captured by professional photographers it seems, on the covers of magazines and nature websites.

Both of us got the pictures of the moon we wanted. We are happy about it but the other phenomenon of the large circular ring of clouds around the moon, almost like a rainbow around it was not able to be captured properly. Either it was too dark and revealed no ring or the moon appeared too bright but still no rainbow ring, the way we saw with our naked eyes.

I hope we would have improved our photography skills in 18 years time to come when this moon shows its brilliant show again. Hope we live to see it once again.

Anyway, it was just awesome to witness that spectacle shown for long hours on a clear night sky. With several faint sparkles of the planets in our solar system accompanying the moon, it was kind of... magical.

At least, an exciting event on a Saturday, replacing our cancelled outdoor outing Wifey and I had planned for the day due to rain that poured the whole day, only to stop towards the evening.

All that rain was a curtain to revealed a very clear sky when it opened wide, for the moon to make its most beautiful appearance for all to see. A stellar performance!