How one photographer got his supermoon photo

Here is the supermoon looming over Kansas.

That photograph took up to a year of work – off and on – before Eagle photographer Travis Heying shot it on Monday evening.

Here’s how he did it.

Heying, an Eagle photographer for 20 years, started planning this shot last year. He watched news and astronomy sites for months, looking for upcoming supermoons – those fat, orange-tinted moons that rise full over a horizon.

When he learned, weeks ago, that we’d see another supermoon rising on Sunday and Monday, he got ready.

“I spent two weeks plotting how I was going to shoot the supermoon,” he said. “Meaning I was trying to think of a structure that I could line up with the moonrise.”

He said that is difficult because Wichita and Kansas are relatively flat.

“I had seen a photo of the supermoon a year ago where people gathered around a castle-like structure in Europe,” Heying said. “Killer photo. So I thought I could try for Coronado Heights (an hour north of Wichita, near Lindsborg).

“I thought that might be a place where people gathered to watch.”

But he wanted to shoot upward, with something embedded inside the giant moon.

At Coronado Heights, there’s a mini-castle, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1936. The castle sits on the bluff of Coronado Heights, which rises sharply above the Kansas prairie by several hundred feet, giving a visitor or photographer a dazzling view 20 miles in any direction.

Heying decided to place himself in a valley nearly a mile and a half west of Coronado Heights and shoot upward, capturing the castle embedded inside the moon rising behind it.

This meant he would not see the moonrise until many minutes after it crested the Kansas horizon to the east. So he put a friend atop the castle as a spotter, to phone him when the moon rose.

But where to point the camera? And where should he stand?

He used an app on his iPhone: the Photographer’s Ephemeris. It gives the photographer a calculated fix on moving celestial objects, even when those objects are below the horizon and about to rise.

“This app shows a map and how I can pinpoint where I am standing or a location where I want to be. And it tells me the angle of the moonrise from my position,” Heying said.

So Heying could know exactly where to stand to line up the Coronado Heights castle to embed itself inside the moon for a few seconds as he aimed his camera lens right on target.

Meanwhile, weeks ago, Heying had put together a camera lens combination nearly 3 feet long.

For those who like technical details, here’s Heying’s explanation of what he put together.

“The focal length for the lens combination I used was 1600 mm. But we don’t own a 1600 mm lens (no one does), so to achieve that, I used two 2x extenders. An extender doubles the focal length of your lens, but at the cost of two F-stops of exposure.

“A 400 mm, F/2.8 lens becomes an 800 mm, F/5.6 lens with an extender. I used two 2x extenders, creating a 1600 mm, F/11 lens. I shot the photo at 1/125th of a second at F/11. I used a monopod to support the lens rather than a tripod because I needed the mobility to move to my right or left quickly.

“The window to shoot the castle with the moon was about 90 seconds.

“The camera was a Canon 1Dx,” Heying said.

“Photo nerds will want to know that.”

This story was originally published November 15, 2016 at 11:16 AM with the headline "How one photographer got his supermoon photo."