Moonset over the Colorado Rocky Mountains

One nice thing about waking up early is the early morning is the quiet. Another once/month bonus (weather permitting) is watching from my office as the Full Moon sets over the Colorado Rocky Mountains to the West - it's pretty amazing how fast it moves and it was less than three minutes from when the moon first "touched" the mountains to disappearing behind it at 6:44AM MDT. The official moonset time from Lafayette, Colorado on Sep 15th, 2008 was 7:00AM (azimuth 271°) ... assuming a flat horizon! ;-)

Coincidentally, my family had flown into DIA airport the night before - landing from the North and shortly after moonrise at 6:43PM. So I had a nice view out my left side window as the full moon rose and it was neat to see it glisten/flash off of water/reflective surfaces as we came in for landing. Unfortunately, I only had my point-n-shoot camera with me, and the lousy picture doesn't do it justice; nor the ones I took earlier (1 & 2) of the wayyy cool cloud formations lit by the last rays of the sun.

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Moonset over the Colorado Rocky Mountains

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These pictures were taken using a tripod mounted Canon 40D and 55-250 telephoto lens ... through a semi-dirty window ... next time, I'm shooting from the roof!
I was playing with aperture/shutter speed, so I have adjusted the images so they have similar exposure - the light was changing very fast as sunrise was at 6:42AM.
Most of these are at ISO 800, F/10, and 1/30 second ... F/10-1/60 or F/8-1/100 would expose the moon better and then we just need the sun to rise a bit earlier! ;-)

Update: I tried shooting this the following month (Oct 13th), but this time the Moonset was at 6:48AM and Sunrise was at 7:09AM. I.e. 21 minutes later rather than 18 minutes before ... and the mountains were wayyyy too dark compared to the bright moon. But I had better luck capturing the January/2009 Moonset that had some wild clouds.

Sun and Moon times can be found at the US Naval Observatory and azimuth can be found here.