** Astrophotographer Zachary Cooper’s intricate composite captures the dramatic beauty of the waxing moon with incredible detail and the elusive glow of earthshine.
📍 ** Yorba Linda, California, USA
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Astrophotographer Zachary Cooper has created a breathtaking image of the first quarter moon rising over Yorba Linda, California, in March 2026. Using a specialized setup – an 80mm refractor telescope and ZWO astronomy camera – Cooper expertly captured the lunar disk, skillfully employing editing techniques to highlight the sunlit side’s shadows and the subtle, ethereal “earthshine” reflecting off its dark portion. The image showcases the moon's surface, particularly the terminator – the line separating light and dark – revealing dark lunar seas and bright craters.
The image’s creation involved a meticulous process of capturing and combining numerous photographs. Cooper initially took 150 short, 5-millisecond exposures to detail the sunlit half of the moon, followed by 100 longer 5-second exposures to reveal the faint earthshine illuminating the shadowed side. Blending these disparate images, particularly around the challenging terminator region, required significant manual adjustment to achieve a cohesive final result.
Cooper’s final image successfully blends the silvery glow and dramatic shadows of the sunlit side with the delicate suggestion of earthshine. The photographer achieved this by carefully layering the elements, preserving the stars and lunar glow from the longer exposure while delicately blending them around the moon to give the final image depth and context.
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