Tonight’s Not-Quite-Full Moon. The Moon will reach its full phase in a little over 24 hours but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t big, bright, and beautiful tonight (May 2, 2015)! Phase in this photo is Waxing Gibbous with about 99% illumination … notice the shadowy edge along the bottom-left.
Excellent photo! The fact that it’s not 100% full, with that tesselated shadow at the bottom, to me underscores the fact that the Moon’s a three-dimensional world.
Thanks! Those subtle shadows and the compressed perspective of surface features approaching the limb help depict “roundness” which, it turns out, is more difficult to capture than it might seem.