Surface Interval · Mahé, Seychelles
On my last night at Blue Hill I stepped onto the terrace and found the moon sitting directly overhead — past half, bright enough to pick out individual craters without any help.
Above Victoria
Blue Hill is a guesthouse above Victoria, up in Sans Soucis beneath Trois Frères. The view drops from the granite peaks down past the harbour to Sainte Anne. By day I’d been watching cloud move across the mountains behind the property. By night the same hillside goes quiet, and on a clear evening the sky opens up fast.
I still had the GH5 and the Panasonic 100–300mm out from filming clouds that afternoon. Racked the lens to 300mm, braced the camera against the railing, and shot handheld. No tripod — just a steady rail and a moon bright enough to hold a fast shutter speed.
The phase is a waxing gibbous — past first quarter, filling toward full, with roughly three-quarters of the disc in sunlight. The surface detail concentrates along the terminator, where every crater near the shadow edge throws a hard line.
The lunar cycle, left to right. This frame sits at the highlighted step — past first quarter, growing toward full.
At nearly five degrees south of the equator, the moon appears tilted compared to how it sits from New York. The whole disc rolls on its axis, so the lit portion rides along the bottom instead of the right side — same moon, different angle.
I shot maybe forty frames that night and kept this one. No foreground, no silhouette, no composition to speak of — just the disc and a lot of black sky. After two weeks of chasing cloud across these islands, the last clear frame I made was pointed straight up.
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