Almost a Full Moon!

It has been a longhand ambition of mine to get a photo of a full moon near or behind the pithead winding gear at Astley Green Colliery.  I have tried several times but it didn't take long to realise that I'd need to do a blended composite of two images to get the correct exposure and desired effect.

Astley Green Colliery has the only surviving headgear and engine house on what was the Lancashire coalfield. The headgear is made from wrought iron lattice girders with rivetted plates at the joints. It has two large and one small wheel mounted at the top. It is nearly 30 metres (98 ft) high and was built by Head Wrightson of Stockton-on-Tees and completed by 1912.

In the winding house there is a twin tandem compound steam engine made by Yates and Thom of Blackburn who supplied 16 Lancashire boilers. Its engine house has the largest steam winding engine used on the coalfield. The 3,300 horse power twin tandem compound engine was built by Yates and Thom in Blackburn.


When I got home I decided to get some (almost) full moon shots from my front garden before the clouds rolled in again.

Super Blue Blood Moon - 31/1/18

It's supermoon time again, and this one is really special as it's a Super Blue Blood Moon according to the experts in astronomy.  The phenomenon hasn't been seen in Europe for over 36 years and so it would be rude not to at least try to get a photograph of it. This is first shot that I took from my back garden in Tyldesley, Greater Manchester.

Supermoon is the name for a full moon when it's at the closest point in its orbit around the Earth. This makes it appear up to 14 percent brighter and 30 percent larger than normal. A blue moon occurs when there is a second full moon in a calendar month. The blue moon isn't actually blue at all, it's just the name give to the second full moon.

The term blood moon comes from the rusty red appearance during a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is in the Earth’s shadow. The colour is caused by blue light scattering as the sun’s rays refract through the Earth’s atmosphere. In the UK this was only visible for about 10 minutes after moonrise.

I decided that I needed a local landmark to put in the foreground of the shot to make it more interesting, but exposing for the moon and the foreground is very difficult without filters or multiple shots.  So I just settled for an atmospheric shot of the moon over Astley Green Colliery, which is just down the road from where I live.

As you can see from the above photo, there was a lot of cloud about in Tyldesley, and I only had a few moments when the full moon actually appeared. Even then it was still quite hazy when I took this photograph of the full moon itself in a slightly longer clear spell later on in the evening.

Unfortunately cloudy skies limited what we could see here in the North West of England, but just as I was closing my bedroom curtains and going to bed, I noticed that the whole of my back garden was being lit up by the moon.  So I dashed downstairs and went outside my front door to take this last shot.  It was absolutely freezing!

Being after midnight actually made it February 1st, but it was still the same night and full moon!

Here's a link to video made by Michael Tomas in London where he had an incredible view of the Super Blue Blood Moon against the London skyline.  In the video Michael explains how he planned and took his incredible shots.

Click this link to read a transcript of Michael's video and some amazing still photographs.

Moonburst Over Astley Green Colliery

Although this blog is mainly about birds and birding, I do occasionally include landscape photographs and indeed, I am hoping to do more of this in the future. With the prospect of clear skies and a bright moon, I went down to Astley Green Colliery this evening to take a shot I've been thinking of for a while.

Ashley Green Colliery is now a coal-mining museum and I believe the pit head winding gear is the last one still standing in the whole of this region and, as such, it is quite an iconic structure around these parts.

My aim was to take a photograph of the moon with the colliery pit head gear in the foreground and it has to be said that I didn't realise how difficult this was going be in terms of exposure.  I've taken photos of the moon before with decent results, but trying to include some detail in the foreground objects proved to be very challenging. Either the moon was too bright or the pit head too dark.

After several attempts with different settings, it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to get the shot I wanted tonight. In the end I had to opt for an atmospheric shot with the moon having a starburst effect.  I now think the only way of pulling the shot is to bracket a number of exposures and combine them together using software.