The Fibonacci Moons Project

 

This project was conceived just after I had finished the "Month of Moons" project, about the time I was teaching HUM 201HN, a Grand Canyon University course on intersections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. The main student project in this course was to present a project that described some kind of intersection between art and science, using some artistic medium.

The scientific concept I was trying to describe was the Fibonacci sequence, which is connected to the Golden Ratio. It happens that the Fibonacci sequence, in which succeeding numbers are the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), describes a spiral which can be seen in many natural structures (do a Google Images search on the Fibonacci sequence, and you'll see what I mean).

I'd intended to finish this project in a month (since I only needed 14 images), but in practice, it took me over a year.

I had several issues:

1. The lens I was using (the M.Zuiko 14-150mm f4.0-5.6) proved difficult to focus in the dark. Since it didn't have a scale on the manual focus ring, I attempted to focus manually on the moon using the magnifying viewfinder, as suggested by sources. That method sometimes did not produce focused images. So, I used auto-focus whenever I could, but the autofocus was constrained by the position of the moon in the frame (if the moon were too close to the edge of the frame, it was impossible to get the AF to target the area). I didn't understand the magnitude of this problem until I began the compositing process.
2. To get the images to composite correctly (using the Olympus Workspace feature), I shot at two focal lengths (150mm and 100mm), so that I could resize in Workspace. That issue, plus the limit on the number of photos that could be composited in Workspace, limited my options unacceptably.
3. A few days per month, even in Arizona, were cloudy, plus, using my ephemeris program to plot the position of the moon in the sky sometimes made me miss the optimum dark time for shooting. Therefore, even the initial phase of the project took more than a month.

I discovered these issues in full during the compositing process, which I unwisely left until after the shooting process. Because of that, I spent a couple of months compositing in Workspace, then reshooting the out-of-focus images. Over the next several months, I continued to have problems 1 and 3 during the reshoots.

I finally was able to composite a complete image in GIMP, using the RAW files generated by my shooting process. Using GIMP gave me more control over image enlargement and placement. So, the end result is not optimal--I'd prefer to have the phases of the moon show more consistently throughout the spiral, and I would like to shoot these images in sequential order as well. So, let's call this project a first draft.

The Month of Moons Project

 The Kit:  the Olympus OMD EM5 Mark iii, paired with the M.Zuiko 14-150 f4-5.6 Zoom

What the project was:  I would take at least one picture per day of the moon for a complete lunar cycle (28 days).

That seems simple.  But in execution, it turned out to be more complex, and involved a fair amount of equipment learning and testing, as well as learning post-processing techniques.  The 12 pictures and videos in this post are the products of this learning curve.  In this collection are single shots of the moon in various phases, composite and high-resolution shots, and some astrophotography, blue-hour and daylight pictures.

My first day of photographing was January 28.  I was trying out a (cheap) telephoto extender; the lens blur and distortion made it unusable, though some elements appeared to be loose in the housing.  I practiced compositing as well, and believe I posted one composite on Instagram, but don't believe it deserves further reproduction.  That experience led me back to the 14-150 f4 zoom that I used for the rest of the project.

My first usable picture, and one that is part of the final products I want to showcase, I took on January 29.  

As I look at it, it now feels a bit dark, but I felt that the effect of the focused moon through the tree was nice.  This early night showed me two things:  I needed to know where the moon would be at any point, so that I could compose shots, and I needed a standard set of camera settings to take the shot.  There are a number of good websites dealing with photographing the moon (interestingly, as a bright object, f11 and 1/125 of a second on a tripod actually work), and a number of ephemerides (moon/sun position) apps are available.  There is a set of online calculators for various shooting scenarios (primarily timelapse) at the Photo Pills website, which also is paired with an app.  I, however, chose a free moon/sun Ephemeris app for Android.

I began getting good shots that night, and made plans for a second composite photograph, one that would show the phases of the moon on consecutive nights.  Here it is, from January 30 through February 1.

I like this one, and it inspired me to attempt a time lapse photo on the moon's movement.  It was this part of the project that convinced me that the ephemeris and the calculators were necessary.  Camera settings for time lapse were also a huge issue, and so I created two "cheat sheets," one for photographing the moon, and one for taking time lapse photos of it.

The cheat sheets, though helpful, did not completely cover all the issues that came up, especially for the time lapse photography.  Below, I will show the most successful of my time lapse photos of the moon.  But the technical problems were huge and recalcitrant.  The autofocus function often blurred out frames of the time laps, so I turned it off.  The general focusing function also had issues, and the darkness of the environment made it difficult to get a consistent focus for the time lapse.  I can't tell whether this is some setting that I have failed to get right for the Olympus OMD EM5 Mark iii, or whether the tripod I used was not stable enough.  In any case, I spent several nights putting together time lapse photographs that ultimately did not turn out.  I also attempted post-processing with Davinci Resolve 16, which allowed me to zoom and pan, but which did seem to magnify the problems of the timelapse (I suppose it stands to reason that if you zoom in, the movement flaws will also be magnified).

So, this bottom one is the finished Davinci Resolve version, and the one above is the original .mov file.  My troubles have convinced me that timelapse with a tripod and telephoto must be insanely stable, or bad things happen.  My timelapses with wide angle lenses have done well.

At the end of the month, I experimented with the Olympus Hi-Res shot feature.  I felt that this would be a a great way to blow up a shot.  Below is the result.

The high resolution shot did work nicely, so for the last few days of the month, I experimented with more composite shots.  Finally, I took some daylight shots on a trip to Tucson, when the moon was in the daylight sky.  Those complete the shareable results of the project.

I did forget this one processed shot, taken at the golden hour, above.

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I'll just end with this final composite, of moon phases, taken at various times in the month.  I planned to do this in the golden ratio pattern, but that didn't really work; that's a future project.