Seven shots of the Waxing Gibbous Moon July 20th 2021

It's been a minute since I've done a moon post. In fact, the last one was back on April 22nd, when I also featured pictures of a Waxing Gibbous Moon. However last night (July 20th 2021), for a brief moment in time, the near continuous rain we've been getting here in the Northeast stopped, the sky cleared, and an awesomely bright orange nearly full orb appeared in the sky. I managed to get a few dozen pictures, and picked the seven best to share today.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have gotten these too, as a few hour later, we got hit with a massive (and somewhat scary) thunderstorm. And lucky that given the near continuous lightning, and thunder that sounded like the sky was splitting into a bazillion pieces, that we didn't lose power or have any damage (like downed trees or big branches) to the property. I usually love thunder boomers, but this one actually had me considering if we'd all fit (one dog, two cats, and five humans) in the basement crawlspace of our house!

As for why it was orange, the not-so-awesome reason is the current rash of wildfires in the Western part of the country. While I'm not happy that rain is in the forecast for the rest of the week (up to and including Friday, when the Full Thunder Moon happens), it's hard to complain about all the precipitation knowing what's going on elsewhere.

Oh, and to explain what a Waxing Gibbous Moon is, here's the definition from the MoonGiant website -

July 20th 2021

Yesterday the Moon was in a Waxing Gibbous phase. This phase is when the moon is more than 50% illuminated but not yet a Full Moon. The phase lasts about 7 days with the moon becoming more illuminated each day until the Full Moon. During a Waxing Gibbous the moon rises in the east in mid-afternoon and is high in the eastern sky at sunset. The moon is then visible through most of the night sky setting a few hours before sunrise. The word Gibbous first appeared in the 14th century and has its roots in the Latin word "gibbosus" meaning humpbacked.

Visit the July 2021 Moon Phases Calendar to see all the daily moon phase for this month.

Lastly, my usual spiel before I get to the pictures - I've reduced the file size, and while I sometimes tweak the exposure and/or sharpness a bit, this time I left them alone, to (hopefully) better showcase how the natural tinting came out. These were all taken with my Nikon affixed to my tripod), in my Durham New Hampshire yard.

The Waxing Gibbous Moon on July 20th 2021

Waxing Gibbous Moon, July 20 2021
1. It took a fair number of tries to get zoomed in just enough to get a clear shot of the moon that kept tint, and didn't make it look like a blurry orange ball. This was my first successful attempt of the evening, and the one that looked the most like what I could see in the sky with my naked eye.

Waxing Gibbous Moon, July 20 2021
2. Zooming all the way in gave me a nice clear shot of the moon, but negated the coloring.

3. Of course, zooming all the way out kept the glow, but it looks like an orb. Again, to my naked eye (and can I still say naked if I was wearing my glasses? lol!), in the sky the moon's definition looked like the first shot, but the rest of the sky looked much the same on and off camera.

Waxing Gibbous Moon, July 20 2021
4. I thought I'd illustrate the difference zooming made to the color with the next four shots. This is how close I could get to the moon without any tint.

5. Zooming back a little bit more, and the color starts to appear.

6. Funny, looking at this one and the previous one side by side in this post, and it's hard to tell much of a difference. But when I was clicking through with my photo viewer, you could see the color in this shot get a bit brighter and more orange (as well as the moon getting a little bit smaller in size).

Waxing Gibbous Moon, July 20 2021
7. And this is about at the limit of how zoomed out I could go before the definition of the moon stopped showing (the next shot was just a blurry orange orb, so I decided to skip it...lol), No wonder when I go out to grab "a few" shots of the moon, I always end up with a ton, since such little adjustments to exposure/zoom make such a difference!