A day/night making images is a day/night well spent.

Tonight was “long exposure” night with the Purdue Photography Club, and my good friend Kevin Liu went over the basics of how long exposure works and then we all headed out front the Purdue Memorial Union to experiment with some long exposure of State Street and the cars going by.

It was pretty cloudy to start off the night, but we all got outside in time, and got the chance to wave to Commander Scott Kelly and crew aboard the International Space Station as they peeked in/out of clouds.

It was a great night all around. I met some new friends, and got to teach people how to use their cameras and how to make cool long-exposure photos — which is always fun.

By far my best image from the night though, came while on my walk home. I came out of the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering, and patted Neil’s statue on the knee as I do almost every time I walk by and looked up and the Moon was enveloped in color. I had seen a post by my friend Chris Becke a day prior about Iridescent clouds and their beauty and immediately thought, this had to be that!

The moon was just surrounded by these gorgeous green, purple, blue, and warm colors and I scrambled to get my tripod camera and lens all put together before it went away, because the clouds were on the move. I usually shoot short exposures but since I knew that wouldn’t work in this situation to show off the color, I had to overexpose quite a bit. Luckily I put it all together in time and ended up with an image you can even see some of the neighboring stars in.

The settings for this image were as follows:

2.5 second exposure

f/4

ISO 250

Taken with a Canon EOS 7D MkII paired with a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens at 75mm.

After I made my image, I got up, said goodnight to Neil and went home.

A day/night spent making images is a day/night well spent.

Taken with an iPhone 6s+ with NightCapApp Pro