St Helens supermoon rising - cut through the pollen

Noted that the supermoon on Wednesday would rise between Mt Adams and Mt St Helens just at sunset (thank you Photographers Ephemeris) IF I was in the right spot. Little cloud cover in the forecast (finally!).

Loaded up my big bright lens and cameras into the backpack (it felt like 50#) and commenced to climb (mountain bike) up 5 miles and 1500' of gain.

Our local trail system has a road that runs along a very steep clear cut, which I call "The View Road" where you can see Mt Rainier, Mt Adams, Mt St Helens, Mt Hood, and on a clear day Mt Jefferson. Once I was in position, this is what I saw:

Heavy pollen haze over the forest, jpg extracted from X3F file

This is a very accurate picture of what the haze was like, if anything the SD1M cut through it a little bit.

Anyway, waited for the moon to rise:

jpg extracted from X3F file, looks like what I saw through the viewfinder

This is why I always shoot RAW, I usually only process in SPP, which is all that was done here:

The sky really was pink/blue, lots more detail than seen above

Out of the series of pictures I think this one was the best, after processing:

Moon rising between Mt Adams (barely visible far left edge) and Mt St Helens

I stayed for just a bit longer, rules of the trail system is need to be out by dark and I still had to pack up the gear and ride 5 miles down to my truck (it was starting to get cold). Enjoyed that super bright moon shining through the trees all the way down. Then drive 3 miles on gravel road to exit the system while still dusk (barely).

I would have enjoyed a much cleaner sky and I thought it would be as I-5 traffic (between me and St Helens) is about a 10th of normal, but, springtime.

I hope you enjoyed my little journey and perhaps the abilities of a raw file to cut through the haze.

bob