Fingernail Moon and Hitchcock Pinnacle. Windy Point, Mount Lemmon, Arizona, 2017
To photograph a fingernail moon at dawn up on Mount Lemmon, you need to hoist your fanny perpendicular early–while it is still inky black outside–and get to your chosen photo-op site at the first indication of light.
Why?
Well, a fingernail moon is a very fragile thing and will disappear rapidly as sunrise approaches and the sky on the eastern horizon travels the painter’s palette from a deep and starry black, to indigo, to cold blue, to delicate pink, to yellow, to orange, to blazing white…and finally, with the Sun alive once again , the heavens settle into that familiar, washed-out, daylight denim of the high winter desert.
In the above example, it was almost…almost…almost too late. A few more minutes and Mother Moon was just a faded Fig Newton of my imagination…invisible to my hairy human eyeball as well as to the sensor in my camera.
A fingernail moon.
Ah, yes, another fine metaphor for the fragility and cyclic nature of Life itself.
2 Comments
Lovely. I remember that rock.
Yep, we (with Chris, too!) did some climbing up in them thar hills way back in ’06, I seem to recall.