New Mexico Oct 2007 (Days 5, 6, and 7)

 Moonrises

I scheduled this trip around the October full moon (The Hunter's moon) on the 25th (Day 7). The moon's name is apt, in that I spent some time "hunting" shooting locations. Using "virtual sky" software to determine the direction of moonrise, I then used a compass to scout out locations with good foreground subjects.

Day 5 - Oct 23rd (Moonrise about 1.5hr before sunset)

I didn't do a whole lot of pre-planning for this moonrise until later that day. After I got to the bottom on the mountains in Alamogordo, pulled out my laptop and determined the moonrise time. Unfortunately, I pulled behind several parked semi-trucks for some shade. After just a couple minutes, a couple of irate truckers walked up to my SUV and wanted to know what I was doing there. I apologized for scaring them (they obviously thought I might be messing with the trailers), and explained what I was doing. One of them laughed and said no problem, but the other guy insisted on hanging around until I left. Didn't matter to me, and I left within a few minutes.

Day 6 - Oct 24th (Moonrise about 1hr before sunset)

This is the location that took the most work, but I have to say were the best shots of the trip. I wanted to get the moon rising near Sunspot Observatory, which I had visited on days 5 & 6. The only problem is that to get the 136ft tall telescope building into a shot along with a decent size image of the moon, I had to be very far away. This also meant that I would need to shoot the image from down in the Tularosa Valley. Using some topographical mapping software, it looked like the shot might be possible. So I figured out where I had to be along US54 south of Alamogordo. It turned out that there were several sparsely populated paved residential streets in the area. When I drove down there, the view of the observatory turned out to be great. The observatory was almost 10mi (straight line) away, and 5000ft higher elevation. I parked the SUV, and setup my equipment...

Day 7 - Oct 25th (Moonrise about 25min before sunset)

I was in White Sands National Monument for sunset/moonrise on this day. To scout a shooting location here, I had to drive around the road thru the dunes and find one placed at the right compass point. Unfortunately, I was restricted to the road; I didn't feel like carrying the camera, tripod, laptop, and a couple of folding chairs out into the dunes. And the dunes close to the road were the easiest to get to, so almost all of them had footprints leading to the top. This was the best, least disturbed, dune I could find. The darker rocks on either side of the dune's peak are the Sacramento Mountains.