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Serendipity always rewards the prepared. -- Katori Hall
What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open. -- Jose Manuel Barroso
Up until October 27, 2015, I was focused on 3-D timelapses and capturing a Moon above a building reflecting the Sun (from 2008), a 180 degree alignment:
Fast forward to October 27, 2015: Luca Vanzella and I were at Riverside Drive capturing a 3-D time-lapse of the Moon after dark when one of us suddenly noticed that the ICE building on the University of Alberta campus was oddly lit up. The extra detail provided by binoculars revealed that the source was the rising Moon reflecting off the windows! Luca used his phone to capture the moment:
For all the reflections we had done and were planning, they were always "back at us" and with two celestial bodies. Here, serendipity opened up a door we hadn't realized was even there - a simultaneous rise and reflection of one object. A month later we joined forces again to catch the near repeat event, then tastefully assembled by Luca into a short movie: https://youtu.be/PGDH8m-5QYY
It didn't take long before we created a bunch of ideas to challenge ourselves and the technology. With a separation of 40 degrees between the Moon and its reflection, the view has to be wide to get them both, and consequently, the size of the Moon in the frame is quite small and featureless. Here's a frame from Luca's movie showing that we tackled that issue by presenting two side-by-side images at a reasonable scale.
However, it gives me a bit of disjointed sensation; it would sure be nice to get a large image of the Moon and its reflection in a single frame.
This is what cloudy nights are for, to give you time to figure things out. The fundamental requirement comes down to having a glancing angle reflection:
At 70mm focal length, the Moon has a reasonable amount of detail and the horizontal field of view with a less than full-size sensor is about 14 degrees. This means that the angle to the window needs to be half that or 7 degrees (less for a larger Moon). Thus followed an intense bout of identifying, for each of our viewing sites, which buildings had just barely visible north or south faces and a clean line of sight to the Moon beyond it. The window of opportunity is relatively narrow, because the sky has to be relatively dark and the air decently transparent. It turns out that the Moon can be Third Quarter (a midnight-ish rise) and still produce a reflection, albeit it's not visually prominent.
Good alignments for Edmonton tend to happen at the equinoxes because most Edmonton buildings have windows facing only a few degrees off E-W or N-S, meaning I had to wait until spring. The geometry taken care of, I next had to get lucky with the weather on very particular mornings and evenings. I jumped (well, oozed) out of bed at 4:45am for a moonset on April 19th. It was going to be dicey because we were experiencing Chinook conditions with a cloud arch reaching westward to Hinton - I worried the Moon might not pop out in the lowest degree of sky, fighting the desire of my body to stay in bed. I heeded the words of Scotsman Robbie Burns who is rumoured to have said "Tis nah a braw bricht moonlit morn if ya dinna git yer bum aboot".
Aye, he was right. Note that window installers for Epcor did such a good job that you can even see the band of cloud crossing the Moon's face in the reflection. This situation shows an 11 degree separation.
Serendipity struck the very next morning, when I was aiming for a time-lapse of a reflected sunrise shortly following a moonset from Forest Heights. To my delight, as the Moon was about to disappear behind the Scotia Bank building, its reflection showed up on the TD Bank at right:
which puts them a mere 5 degrees apart. That's going to be tough to beat, but there are a handful of new tall buildings in Edmonton under construction, all with glass faces - I just need their orientation and my viewpoints to be lined up within 4 degrees or less. That will require luck, not serendipity.
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