If you arrive in Yosemite in spring and early summer and around the time of the full moon, you might want to hike to Yosemite Falls and view a moonbow, or lunar rainbow or a waterfall mistbow. A moonbow is a rainbow caused by moon light, rather than direct sunlight. When viewing this phenomenon, your own eyes can't see the color of the spectrum showing through the mist of the water, but when you take a long exposure, 20 to 30 seconds, with your camera, the colors appear in the final image. The night of the full moon is the brightest, but up to 2 days before or after the night of the full moon will also work.
To work on this image, we went on the night of the full moon and lower Yosemite Falls was very crowded with photographers. A lot of people know about this event now. Many saw some good results. But this image was captured the night after the full moon. Rick went back the next night and almost had the place to himself, and the double moonbow was already showing as soon as he arrived. To make sure people viewing this image can tell that it was taken at night, we included some of the sky with stars showing at the top of the frame.
One of the great challenges of taking this sort of image is that you need the mist from the falls in order to get the moonbow, but then if the mist reaches high enough, it can make the rest of the image look fuzzy. There's also a very good chance that you'll get wet during the process of capturing the image. Including stars in the sky helps convince people that the image was taken at night, but a very long exposure can allow enough time for the Earth's rotation to cause the stars to become streaks.
You can get predictions for this year's (2013) best moonbow viewing dates and times from the Texas State University's Astronomy Department's web site. The direct link to this year's moonbow in lower Yosemite Falls is at: uweb.txstate.edu/~do01/moonbows2013loweryosemitefall.html.
Remember, it's not just a picture, it's a story!
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