The Moon Tonight

13th May 2022

A quiet garden moment with a borrowed telescope and a lot of patience

Every now and again I find myself out in the garden, wrestling with a telescope and trying to photograph the moon. This particular shot was taken on 13 May 2022 through a telescope kindly lent by a friend. It’s not as simple as pointing and clicking – the moon may look still, but try magnifying it a few hundred times and you’ll see how much it shimmies and shudders. Air quality becomes a fickle collaborator: warm nights often mean dancing detail, as the atmosphere refuses to sit still.

Still, I love it. There’s something profoundly satisfying about capturing that pale, pockmarked face in such crisp detail. Our funny little orbiting rock – ever present and yet impossibly distant.