Moonset behind the Longships

I woke early this morning to the sound of Storm Eleanor rattling my bedroom windows,  It was just coming up to Six am but seemed far to light outside,  Pulling back the curtains explained it all as a Waning Gibbous Moon of 96.9% illumination was passing over a windy but cloudless sky providing very impressive levels of moonlight as it tracked west.   I had plans to be at Lands End for an 8.21am sunrise to capture some Longships lighthouse storm shots so I popped straight on to my computer to check out a moon tracking app to discover that moonset would be at 302 Degrees at exactly the same time as sunrise at 8.21am so there could be a chance of getting enough daylight onto the lighthouse to record it as the moon went down.  I got my kit together and headed off early to give myself time to find a sheltered spot to line up this potential composition bearing in mind that storm Eleanor was gusting in from the west at 50+ MPH,   I could not find suitable shelter so I ended up parking my car at my chosen tripod position to gain as much protection as possible from the wind which was relentless.                      

The moon started to become hazy as it dropped towards the horizon behind the lighthouse so I started taking shots at 8.10am before it was lost in the poor visibility and spray being created by the storm,  I had to use a high ISO 6400 on my Nikon D5 and maximum aperture on the 500mm lens to retain a shutter speed of 1/500th sec to freeze the wave action.  I worked in portrait format to get both the lighthouse and the moon composed together earlier than intended only to find that I could not get both subjects sharp in one frame on a telephoto lens so I also took registered sequenced images and focused independently on each of them to enable me to merge the two images together during post production.

Moving on to the relative protection of the photo kiosk at the hotel as light levels improved I added a Nikon 1.7  teleconverter to my lens to gain closer portraits of the lighthouse at a focal length of 850mm as huge waves crashed over it and by around 9am the sun broke clear of the land and passing clouds to record more detailed images of the lighthouse as it stood firm against yet another howling storm.

The above mobile phone image shows the distance and conditions that have to be overcome to get these shots and the image below demonstrates the power of Storm Eleanor and the steadfast engineering skills that went into both building and maintaining this amazing landmark that the Atlantic high seas are forever trying to demolish,  "This is the Wild Cornwall that I love "