My Favorite Moon Photos Of 2022

This year I set a crazy goal of making photos of the full moon every month. That sounds like an easy thing, but mother nature can have other ideas. I did try to find an interesting moon photo to make every month though. Sometimes I was lucky and I was able to capture a couple of different looks at the moon in a month. Here are some of my favorite moon photos from last year.

The first full moon of the year was on a cloudy day. The clouds cleared enough for me to make the photo above. My goal was to make photos of the moon with a foreground interest, but technically these clouds are in the foreground so it counts.

The second full moon of the year was a near miss. With clouds at night I got up early to catch it as it rose. I couldn’t find anything to line it up with as it initially rose, but I liked this idea of it straight over the engineering fountain and Hovde Hall.

In March I made this photo while leaving a basketball game. Of course I didn’t have my big lenses, but it was still fun to see the moon rise around the Boilermaker statue. Later in the countdown I revisit this idea on a special occasion.

There was a great photo that really was not planned. I was up early to see five planets all in a line. I was scouting locations when I realized that I could make this fun photo. It took some last minute running around, but it worked out pretty well for me.

Speaking of all of the planets here is the moon in between a few planets. I had to make a panoramic image to get them all in. This was never a photo meant for sales, but rather to just document how cool the event was.

I had this idea to get the moon rising over the courthouse in Lafayette. Of course a low level cloud blocked my initial idea, but I moved quickly (running down a ramp with a 600mm lens on a tripod) to make the tight photo above. I then made the second photo as the moon rose a little more. I like both of these photos for different reasons. I really need to make my original photo idea though one of these days when the clouds are not blocking me.

Sometimes I like the idea of just walking outside and making a moon photo. It is not always for everyone, but I really enjoy the process of making the photo. Just after sunset is my favorite time to make the photo.

I spent a few nights this year on top of Slayter Hill watching the moon rise. It is the perfect place most of the time to capture the moon rising around the Purdue bell tower. Here are a few of my favorites from the year.

Coming home from Slayter Hill after a moon shoot I saw this possibility happening. I quickly drove up the hill and then ran back down it with my 600mm lens and my tripod. I then chased the moon a bit to make this photo. As I was doing it I wondered what it would look like if I gave it a very warm look. It looks like the sun here, but it is the moon rising.

This year the moon and Jupiter put on a show for a few nights in October. I am not the best astrophotographer, but I did have fun lining this photo up. In the future I would like to get some foreground interest in between these kinds of things, but here this worked out pretty well to show what was happening.

The blood moon was an event that I was not sure how I would capture it. I wanted to be higher up like on a parking garage with a high foreground subject near the moon. No matter where I looked nothing lined up. I just decided to drive up to campus to make some images. I was headed away from the sports area when I realize that before it went into the full eclipse I could make a photo at the Boilermaker statue. This was completely unplanned, but became my favorite photo of the night.

Here are a couple of more photos from the blood moon on campus. You have a couple of photos around the engineering fountain that I liked with a very wide photo from on top of a parking garage showing the blood moon and a field of stars. If you click on the bottom photo then you can see the photo a little bigger. I had this thought of making a photo showing just how small we are in this whole thing.

While walking down to our gathering spot before the Lafayette Christmas parade I saw this photo that could line up. My little one knows the drill and she knows that a small detour is needed sometimes for a photo. Thankfully she is fine with that.

On New Year’s Eve I made one last moon photo for 2022. I was down by the river watching the wildlife when I saw this cloud approaching the moon. I decided to try and time it so it looked like the moon was coming out of the cloud. It was one last moon photo in a year when I tried to focus on it a little more.

So those are my favorite moon photos from the year. I really had fun trying to incorporate it into photos. This year I don’t know that I will set any goals around the moon like last year. I think that I will just try and get out and make moon photos whenever I can. Some of these moon photos are not even close to the full moon so maybe the goal which is not a goal is to find more ways to make those photos.