Back to the Moon!

Quite the discussion going on in Madison Guy's comments for this photo, on how to deal with the moon.

Problem is that it's absolutely gorgeous and in best winter ice-crystal mode, but also it's closer to the earth than usual and REALLY bright.

Like MG and some other people, I did a Photoshop job to keep the moon and sky both exposed. The photo of the sky was exposed in program mode, and gave a nice natural looking cloud cover with a white hole in the frame where the moon was. The photo of the moon was exposed with a spot reading right on the disk, putting it on neutral grey, allowing the tones to be processed later without losing detail. Actually I should probably have offset the exposure to put the moon up a zone, which is one of the problems.

Quite a bit of tinkering was necessary to get the whole mess together. I actually like MG's picture better, because he started with better images.