Bashful Moon meets Mr. HDR

In my 6/7/2008 "Bashful Moon" posting I said, "There is a technology coming of age [High Dynamic Range photography] that will do this kind of thing automatically -- digitally combining multiple exposures, to bring out the detail from all of them."

Well, here are two original exposures of the Bashful Moon. The first one shows the Moon's disk, but only the closest clouds are visible. There are plenty of clouds in the second exposure, but the Moon has completely disappeared into the highlights:





Running them through the Photomatix HDR image processing software gives the following result. Both the Moon's disk and the clouds are nicely visible.



Cropping makes it more interesting. You can clearly see that the reddish coloration around the moon forms a ring. This was evident when I viewed the cloud-shrouded Moon that night, but neither single exposure reveals that fact; only the combined image shows what I actually saw with my own eyes.



Just for jollies, I also cropped it the same as the 6/7/2008 posting. The color border around the Moon is still visible as a ring, yet that feature was not evident at all in the earlier blog entry.



I don't know about you, but I think this is cool stuff.