Fly me to the moon

I have always admired photographers that have managed to capture a plane flying across the moon. And always dreamed about one day doing it myself. And then, as most often in life, things just happen. The Significant Other and I were sitting on the balcony of our Southern Home, enjoying dinner and the moon rise over the roofs, towers and domes of Genoa. The admittedly not completely full but rather large disc of the moon was rising quickly into the sky.

I had the Nikon Zf out with the Nikkor 24-200/4-6.3 attached to capture some close ups of the moon behind the historic skyline. Then, a bit later, the evening flight from Munich was coming in, also from behind the city, flying along the shoreline for landing at Cristoforo Colombo Airport. And I thought….this might just work out. And so it did. I squeezed off two shots, and the first one nailed it. Fly me to the moon….

As the saying goes…luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Although I nearly screwed up. As I should have switched the camera to burst mode, but completely forgot to thing about in this moment. Maybe because the Nikon has no lag at all and I completely trust that I can nail the exact moment. In my second shot, the plane was already half out of the moon.

I took the shot handheld, image specs 1/400 sec @ f6/3, ISO 500, 200mm focal length and -1 exposure compensation, retaining details in the moon surface. The image above is heavily cropped in. Postprocessing in Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.

Have a great Saturday

Marcus

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