On Saturday, June 3rd 2023, I captured my fifth successful full moonrise in a row – going back to February. This is insane luck considering the country I live in and how frequent of a visitor cloud is to ruin things. As far as this June one went, it was as good as you can get.

I used The Photographer’s Ephemeris app to plan the photo shoot. This wasn’t just like other moonrises I’ve done where I could just follow the line very easily. I needed to calculate carefully the speed of the moon rising and where it would go to line up with the lighthouse with significant obstruction.

The moon started to rise a few minutes before sunset so was barely visible on the horizon as it was still too bright out. At my location for the composition of getting the moonrise over Balbriggan Lighthouse, my horizon was completely obstructed by south Balbriggan and Ardgillan. Normally, I would have to guesstimate and do my best guess work but the drone came in handy on this occasion. I sent my DJI Mini 3 Pro up above me and let it hover trying to see where the moon would exactly rise from and when it started to show. I was a bit anxious my alignment was going to be off but from a stroke of luck, I was actually bang on and the drone was able to confirm this for me before the moon appeared over Ardgillan.

I managed to capture the moonrise lined up with the lighthouse perfectly with various colour as it rose higher. The moon looks small as I was not able to use 600mm lens compression to my full advantage due to the relatively short distance between me and the lighthouse which was impossible to overcome because of the close proximity. This was also not a “supermoon” event (the proper term is lunar perigee) where the moon is closer to the earth than a standard moonrise.