Two resources for planning your lunar photography evening

A friend poin­ted me to this BBC art­icle about tonight’s full moon. It seems that tonight’s full moon event will occur when the Moon is the closest it’s been to the earth (dur­ing a full moon) in 15 years.

Well, methinks. A per­fect time to get out the pho­to­graphy and tele­scopy equip­ment and cap­ture this event.

But wait. This is Winter. In Canada. In Edmon­ton. Before we head out to the great white north, let’s do a bit of research to make the most of the event.

When will the full moon occur?

Accord­ing to the help­ful chart at Edmon­ton­’s Telus World of Sci­ence, the Moon will rise at 3:53 pm and set at 9:12 am the next day. Since the Sun will be set­ting about the same time, great twi­light illu­min­a­tion of any sur­round­ing clouds or land­scape will occur. Sim­il­ar resources can be found at Skymaps.com, Astronomy.com and SkyAndTelescope.com.

What about the clouds?

Of course, to actu­ally see this full moon, cloud cov­er should be at a min­im­um.  Unfor­tu­nately, accord­ing to the Clear Sky Chart for Edmon­ton, over­cast con­di­tions are pre­dicted. Charts for your region may be found at ClearDarkSky.com

Click the image for the full size version

So. Unfor­tu­nately, it looks like I’ll be doing some­thing oth­er than tak­ing pic­tures of the moon this even­ing. Hmmm, Rock Band 2 anyone? 🙂