Perigee-Syzygy Ride

I’m sorry about the clunky title of this blog post. I was originally going to title it “Supermoon Ride”.  However, a quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that the term supermoon was coined in recent decades by an astrologer. As I am pretty firmly in the NON astrology camp my choice seemed obvious.

Anyway….

On Saturday night the sky was clear, the moon was bright, and I was awake at one a.m. A bike ride seemed in order. When I woke my wife up to tell her I was headed out she sleepily told me to take pictures of the moon. I was doubtful that my little point and shoot camera would be able to capture anything worthwhile, but I dutifully tucked it into my shoulder bag. I was planning on taking my recently purchased Norco Magnum GT for a fast ride so I decided not to pack my somewhat bulky tripod with me. In retrospect, this was an obvious mistake.

The riding was fantastic. The night was cool without being cold, the traffic was light and the bike was ridiculously smooth rolling and fast. And, of course, the moon was brilliant and beautiful. I must say, however, that any increase in the apparent size of the moon was not discernible to me. I zipped through quiet residential neighbourhoods into downtown. There was still a good amount of carousing going and I had a pretty amusing short conversation with an intoxicated pedestrian while I waited for  light to change. I headed back North along the top of the river valley enjoying the moonlit view of the river.

While the ride was great the photographing was only OK. Without the tripod, it was more than a little difficult to hold the camera steady enough to prevent blurry photos. It mostly involved a lot of holding my breath and trying to find objects to steady the camera against. Sometimes that object was the ground, requiring me to lay flat in the grass. In all, the results were at least as good as my Midnight Photoshoot last year when I did bring the tripod but was using my older and lesser camera. That’s progress.

I was back home by 3 a.m. and postponed the photo culling until the next day. A keen eye will be able to guess which photos I took for my wife (hint: there are no bikes).