[Leica] I got published in Sky & Telescope magazine, but...

[Howard Ritter]

Last October I took some nice photos of the fully eclipsed Moon setting towards trees low in the west. It was as the sky was just beginning to be light enough that the sky was a deep, dark blue in an exposure that captured the Moon nicely, but not so bright that the exposure would have to be too short to capture stars as well or so bright that the trees in the foreground would be illuminated. Here’s a link to my original photo:

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Blood+Moon/Blood+Moon+in+Stars.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Blood+Moon/Blood+Moon+in+Stars.jpg.html>  Please view full.

I think it’s an attractive composition, and it nicely captures something not often seen in astroimages—five distance scales: the tree, the sky, the Moon, Uranus (brightest point of light to the left of the Moon), and the stars. I submitted it to S&T noting these aspects of the image, both of which require inclusion of much more than the Moon to appreciate. The photo, or a small part of it, will be published in the May issue. The issue hasn’t been released yet, and there’s no link to the image, but I got a pre-publication copy because my photo was chosen for publication.

I was surprised to find it cropped down to just a 2 x 2" “head shot” of the Moon, with barely any surrounding sky or sense of its color, and no tree, Uranus, or stars. Taken with a 400mm zoom, this image was not meant to be a detailed view of the eclipsed face of the Moon, but rather was a study of the eclipsed Moon low in the sky in a field that included terrestrial, planetary, and stellar objects as well. It’s a composition that, esthetically and scientifically, works only if the whole is present. Cropped down to a passport photo of the Moon, it’s too low-res and pedestrian to be worth publishing, IMHO.

I’m certainly flattered, and grateful to S&T for giving me my first magazine image publication, but disappointed in the way they chose to do it. Am I being too critical? Or is this just another example of the eternal gulf between "content creators" and editors?

—howard