A waxing crescent and moon information

 The other day, I found myself rather surprised by this waxing moon just after sunset and vowed to make myself more informed of the moons schedules.  I am rather well prepared and pay attention to the sun's activity, times of sunrise and sunset as well as the various twilight times but realized I need to do more with regard to the moon, as they can add so much to an image. The combination of the waxing crescent and the red glow of twilight make this a rather stunning image. This image was shot at approximately 8:30 pm, a little over 1/2 hour after sunset and about the end of civil twilight. It is right from the camera with no separate shot of the moon and layering it in Photoshop. The little black dots above Haystack Rock are seagulls circling their remaining nests.So I spend a fair amount of time on the internet as well as reviewing the various apps to determine the best method of living up to my vow. I can report that there are several web sites with useful information on the moon including calendars and other data. Here are several that I rather liked. 

• Moonconection.com (http://www.moonconnection.com/) This site looks like it has some rather interesting software for Windows users.
• timeanddate.com (http://www.timeanddate.com/) is a rather interesting web site with a very good sun and moon calendar creator, but the most useful is:
• The sun and moon calculator by Large Format Photography (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/sunmooncalc/) The advantage of this calculator is that one can figure out the dates for the moon they want to shoot and/or the dates that most work for them. To give you an example, I computed the dates for full moons within 3 hours of sunrise and sunset for the next 4 months.

The tricky thing about using this scheduler is that one has to remember is a full moon will always be on the opposite side of what the sun is doing, so the moon is setting when the sun is rising and visa versa. Here is a comparable chart for a new moon only set for 2 hours before and after sunrise/sunset.

With a new moon, the waxing and waning crescents are on the same side of the sun's activity; ie. when the sun is setting the moon will be setting.

There are some good Apple apps that work on either the iPad or iPhone that are worth looking at. Each are a little different whether one is putting them on the iPhone or the iPad:

• Darkness is one of my favorites and one of the most versatile iPhone apps with sunrise/sunset moonrise/moonset and twilights for various locations.
• Moon Phase is another useful iPhone app with a regular moon calendar.
• LightTrac is now my favorite iPhone/iPad app for keeping track to where the sun and moon is going to rise or set from day to day, along with their times.
• Deluxe Moon HD is a good iPad moon app and
• 3D Sun & Moon compass HD looks pretty cool and has a very good rating but it only works on the iPad 2 so could not try it out.