Over the Moonbow

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Betsy and I went to Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky to celebrate my birthday and, if possible, to see the moonbow which occurs on clear nights with a full moon.  The night we were there was slightly hazy, and a ranger told Betsy that we wouldn’t be able to see anything.

Although we could see the falls in the moonlight, we did not see any sign of a moonbow at all.  But I decided, since we were there, I would do some experimenting with night photography and time exposures.  I took some 15 second exposures at where we thought the moonbow should be, but in camera, everything was black.

I was surprised, when I looked at the photos on my computer to see, although the photo was very dark, a faint moonbow.  I worked on the image in Photoshop and was able to bring out the moonbow a little more.  This image is noisy, but it is proof that there was indeed a moonbow although we couldn’t see it with our naked eyes.