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
![Moon Trail](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/qGOpIc5CW0GKbCWqHgQMSGRcqpI=/fit-in/1072x0/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/33/50/3350f0ac-f84c-49b7-9adc-d518232988e4/janne_2.png)
“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.