Since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated by astronomy. When I was 9, I got my first telescope at a yard sale for $10, missing an eyepiece. I took apart the sighting scope and re-assembled the lenses in it to create a new eyepiece, and subsequently spent every night I could stargazing. I projected the image of the sun onto paper to see sunspots, and watched the moons of Jupiter change positions each night. But I've always been most fascinated by the beautiful details on our nearest neighbor, the moon. My favorite time to moongaze is between crescent moon and first half, when the earth illuminates the portion of the disk of the moon not in direct sunlight.
Fast forward to when I got my first DSLR with a telephoto lens, I tried to capture this image, but was never able to get both the sunlit and earthlit parts of the moon to balance, due to the extreme difference in brightness. Now that I've learned a bit about exposure blending, and composite imaging, I've always wanted to produce one of these images.
The other night, I captured several crescent moon images, at various exposures, and was able to blend 2 of them to create this image. A small amount of haze in the sky added a nice glow to the moon, creating a dreamy environment, and I couldn't be happier with how this turned out.
