Picture: Waning Gibus Moon over rock pinnacle on the rim of Yosemite Valley in pre-dawn light, Yosemite National Park, California
Tuesday nights are “Pool Nite” (as in billiards) for me. It’s my current form of therapy and stress relief, as well as one of the few other things I consider myself fairly decent at. Mind you, I’m not great, but I can hold my own in about 50+% of my games. So last night, just as I was walking to my truck, I spied the beautifully full, large moon rising in the eastern sky. This was one of those times when life teaches us that not all great moments must be captured by a camera. By choice or nessecity, sometimes we just need to look, feel, and feed our soul; to mark our connection to our place in Nature, the Universe, and the River of Time. Unfortunately, my camera was nearby, but my time schedule allowed nothing more than a moment to simply absorb the magnificent celestial show. The jealous photographer in me thought about all those other photographers who were busily snapping away, catching the moment as I could not.
Just as an aside; The size of the moon appearing so large as it rises or sets over a horizon is an optical illusion caused by the hard wiring of our brains. The full moon is actually the same exact size near the horizon as it is when it straight overhead. The reason the moon appears larger closer to the horizon is that our brain automatically assigns a sense of scale when two objects are placed in proximity to each other. Once the moon is fully overhead, there is nothing for our brain to associate any scale, and thus we lose any real ability to assign a sense of ‘size’. No matter how well I know this fact to be true, I always find myself unable to impose that same sense of grandeur when I look at the moon overhead, even though I know my brain saw this same disc dominate my vision only hours earlier when it was first rising into the evening sky.
You can see more of my Yosemite images in my online web gallery.
