A Full Beaver Moon.

The Full Beaver Moon, as the Algonquian people refer to the full moon of November, is an illusive sight – it’s not a particularly settled time as weather goes, and given the statistical propensity for cloudy weather during any  full moon, the likelihood of getting a clear shot at November’s Finest is slim.

So I wasn’t surprised ( though I’ll admit to a bit of disappointment) to find this evening’s almost-full-moon rising through a thick layer of haze, yielding this suboptimal image:

It’s a curse, this quest for a nice shot of a full moon.  Maybe the clearer air of winter will be more cooperative, but tonight’s wasn’t..

Anyway, switching gears and lenses,  I headed westward into Williamstown, aiming for a western slope I knew of.  The plan was to let the moon rise above the haze, then catch it in reasonable proximity to some pastoral scene which sloped upward to the East, and hopefully before the last light had left the land so there’d be something to pin it to.

I got lucky.  With Elliot on the box, I snagged this shot of cat-tails issuing their rheumy rattle to an indifferent moon:

This twenty second exposure suffered some breezes, so it’s not what it might have been, but I dug the juxtaposition of the colorless foreground grasses and cattails and the still-trying pasture beyond.  Tall things seem to give it up sooner as Winter approaches, yet somehow they’ll persist in their dessicated state long after the sun has returned and most smaller things have self-composted.

Further on up the hill, the corn stubble of a harvested field lead my eye to a nearly full moon and tonight’s companion, Jupiter:

…though the latter is barely discernible at blog resolutions.

These are both  courtesy of Elliot, at f:20 and about two degrees of tilt.

Well, given the forecast, that’s likely to be it for November moons.  We’ll have sleet and more wet snow before the weekend gets away.