Friday the 31st July 2020 was an amazing night to shoot the moon with an impressive halo around it so I discovered on the Saturday when photos were showing up in the socials. I was kicking myself as I love seeing this phenomenon and I usually check the night sky but on this night I didn’t I was very tired and ended up in bed early.

After this I made sure to check the skies each night and hope it would occur again, luck was on my side, I only had to wait until Sunday night to catch the encore.

There were clouds around at 8pm but they were clearing quickly. I got a few shots with half cloud and half stars, then a close up shot of just the moon at 8:15. I headed back inside thinking the sky would be clear shorty but made a mental note to check soon just in case and by 8:40pm there it was the halo and I was prepared to get some shots.

Dressed up in my best, tracksuit pants with socks and sandals I stepped outside the front door and snapped a few captures with my 12-40mm 2.8 which did fit the halo in the frame but not a whole lot more so a quick lens change to the 7-14mm was in order to capture more of the scene to make the photos more interesting.

There’s a nearby park that I go to sometimes for sky photos, sunset or astro, to get away from the tall trees. There are two ovals, a large and smaller one and a small playground that I’ve used before as foreground interest. It’s not that far to go with socks and sandals! :)

Below is a gallery of photos captured between 8:40pm and 9pm on the 2nd August 2020. Only two retain some colour in the ground and trees, the others have been edited in the same way to remove all colours but the blues. All photos hand with my Olympus OM-D EM-1 MKII hand held up to 2 seconds, one of the benefits of Olympus IBIS, enjoy!

Purchase a print of the ‘Tree Light’, if you’d like to purchase any others please let me know.

Winter Lunar Halo