A Streak in the Sky: Photographer Captures an Incredible Time-lapse Image of the Moon
Janne Voutilainen’s photo took nearly 40 minutes to shoot
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“Is it a huge lingonberry? Is it a ruddy apple? No, but it is something much more delicious, namely the full moon low on the horizon.” That’s how Janne Voutilainen, a Finnish photographer who lives in Tarinaharju, describes his picture of what he calls the “full moon gradient”: a 37.6-minute exposure that shows the moon streaking across the sky.
While long-exposure photos of stars have become common, PetaPixel’s Michael Zhang notes that it’s much rarer to see one of the moon. Voutilainen admits that it took a couple of tries to get the exposure correct. “A moving, gradually brightening subject is not so easy to photograph,” he told me by email. “The trick behind the shot was a 10-stop neutral density filter, which greatly cut down the amount of light hitting the sensor,” he told Zhang at PetaPixel.
A glimpse at Voutilainen’s body of work shows that he’s obsessed with showing the moon and the stars as they can only be seen from the spare, snowy north. Here’s a slideshow of some of his photographs of the night sky.
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