Object Information                                            Imaging Details

We don't get many halos here in the desert southwest, so when a bright halo occured on 11Dec, I decided to capture it using an ultra wide angle lens.

Halos, like rainbows are produced by light reflecting on water drops, dust and ice crystals in the atmosphere. Lunar halos show only very faint colors visually since the illumination is much lower. However, the color is there - it just needs to be enhanced a bit.

The challenge for a shot like this is to create a high dynamic range image that gives good colors, but doesn't blow out the Moon's shape (9-day old waxing gibbous phase in this case). So, several different exposures were taken.

Telescope:

Canon EF 15mm fisheye lens