Buck Moon over San Francisco

My last San Francisco layover was during July full moon, also called 'Buck Moon'. There was quite some media coverage about 'the first supermoon of 2023'. For me, this is a complete hype, though. The difference between the size of a so-called 'supermoon' and a regular full moon is just a few percent and therefore negligible as we will never be able to visually compare them side by side.

 

Their bright light, however, makes Milky Way photography all but impossible, and so I was planning to do some daylight scouting for future visits. As the spots I had on my list were all covered in coastal fog, though, I decided to take advantage of the weather and the moon phase.

 

To get above the fog drifting through the Golden Gate, covering the bridge and the coastal valleys, but sparing the city center and the higher hills, I headed to Mount Tam. After some hiking and shooting a few time-lapses of the fast-moving fog, I captured the 'Buck Moon' rising behind Mt. Hamilton, home of the famous Lick Observatory, the layered fog over the coastal hills and downtown San Francisco's skyscrapers glowing in the last light of the fading day.

 

For a silky-smooth look of the fog, without blurring the moon, I stacked 10 short exposures of the foreground and separately aligned and stacked the moon of the same exposures for noise reduction.

 

EXIF

Canon EOS-R7

Canon RF100-500 L @ 200mm, f/5.6

Stack of 6x 1/40s @ ISO100

Done