Almost a Full Moon!

It has been a longhand ambition of mine to get a photo of a full moon near or behind the pithead winding gear at Astley Green Colliery. I have tried several times but it didn't take long to realise that I'd need to do a blended composite of two images to get the correct exposure and desired effect.

Astley Green Colliery has the only surviving headgear and engine house on what was the Lancashire coalfield. The headgear is made from wrought iron lattice girders with rivetted plates at the joints. It has two large and one small wheel mounted at the top. It is nearly 30 metres (98 ft) high and was built by Head Wrightson of Stockton-on-Tees and completed by 1912.

In the winding house there is a twin tandem compound steam engine made by Yates and Thom of Blackburn who supplied 16 Lancashire boilers. Its engine house has the largest steam winding engine used on the coalfield. The 3,300 horse power twin tandem compound engine was built by Yates and Thom in Blackburn.

When I got home I decided to get some (almost) full moon shots from my front garden before the clouds rolled in again.

Moonburst Over Astley

Although I mainly blog about birds and birding, I do occasionally take landscape photographs and indeed, I am hoping to do more of this in the future. With the prospect of clear skies and a bright moon, I went down to Astley Green Colliery this evening to take a shot I've been thinking of for a quite a while.

The Colliery is now a coal-mining museum and I believe the pit head winding gear is the last one still standing in the whole of this region and, as such, it is quite an iconic structure around these parts.

My aim was to take a photograph of the moon with the colliery pit head gear in the foreground and it has to be said that I didn't realise how difficult this was going be in terms of exposure. I've taken photos of the moon before with decent results, but trying to include some detail in the foreground objects proved to be very challenging. Either the moon was too bright or the pit head too dark.

After several attempts with different settings, it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to get the shot I wanted tonight. In the end I had to opt for an atmospheric shot with the moon having a starburst effect. I now think the only way of pulling the shot is to bracket a number of exposures and combine them together using software.

This is a shot to which I will return many times.