Sunsets and moon haloes

Yesterday was a remarkable day for a fine sunset and, later on, a moon with a halo around it. 

I saw the sunset at Dell Quay on Chichester Harbour, from various points above (and on) the shingle foreshore, from the quay itself, and from the pub there, the Crown & Anchor, which seems to have been built expressly with sunsets in mind. It was in fact originally put up in the sixteenth century for the use of merchants and the working locals. Dell Quay was then a major South Coast port. Even today it's not hard to imagine small sailing ships tying up there, and a small army of thirsty men unloading its cargo. Nowadays Dell Quay is, like most of Chichester Harbour, one of those roosting-places for the boat and yacht set. More on them below.

I'd been here several times before, the previous occasion being in early February last year, when I found a path that took me to a viewpoint above that foreshore, where willowy trees with twirling branches silhouetted themselves against the setting sun:

There was a single boat out there on the mud. The air was cold and very clear, and in the fading light the water looked very mysterious. The sunset was gone all too quickly, and I promised myself that I would come again, with more time available for the pictures I wanted. 

I achieved that yesterday, arriving in Sophie with over an hour to play with. It was another chilly afternoon. I'd used my Leica X-U with its fixed 35mm lens for the pictures taken back in February 2022, a camera I later sold so that I could buy the more-versatile Leica X Vario (LXV). 

I wanted to find out what LXV could do with the same scenes. Its zoom lens could go from 28mm to 70mm, and therefore offered me much more scope. But it was a slowish lens, only f/3.5 at maximum, although that wouldn't be a hindrance so long as it was pointed at the sunset. I think it acquitted itself pretty well. Here are some of the results:

The sun's light was orangey and rather too strong for my eyes. But photography demanded a resolute approach. And the sun soon went down.

The quay itself didn't provide too much in the way of worthwhile shots, apart from these:

So I turned to the pub. I wanted a coffee anyway. It was a welcoming place in the gathering twilight.

I got a fine view of the afterglow from the window at the end of the bar, before being asked to move because the table was booked and needed to be laid.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a pub for the boat-and-yacht set, or their friends, and I couldn't help noticing how it was filling up with persons in the twenty-five to thirty-five age bracket, and their children. You know, 'young professionals'. West Sussex's finest. 

They didn't however seem especially happy, even though noisy enough. While ordering my coffee at the bar, I overheard more than one over-serious man-to-man conversation about office matters that nearly got me yawning. And on a nearby table, a young woman was speaking to her young man in a rather severe way, as if telling him off, or at least giving him instructions. He was taking it like a sponge, without standing up for himself, and might have been cringing. I wondered what he'd done to merit such a scolding, and why he wasn't trying to justify himself as men used to do, even when very much in the wrong. Perhaps it was all about what he hadn't done. Or maybe she was just a bossy young woman, who had realised that in the modern world men were on the back foot and could be pushed around. 

I have to admit, it does seem quite easy to get one's way with the average man. But then I have become naturally more assertive and self-confident with advancing age, quite different to how I once was. No doubt many of my generation would say the same.

It did strike me, though, that these young pubgoers weren't having much fun. It seemed to be hard work for them. Perhaps they'd all read too many books about psychology. Perhaps they felt doomed, as if the world had already been utterly ruined by my generation, and they were now the unlucky inheritors with nothing extra special to look forward to. 

Coffee drunk, I went outside onto the decked side-garden, to secure my final pictures:

The maximum aperture available when LXV is zoomed out to 70mm is only f/6.4: the above shot had to be taken at ISO 3200. It's a cropped version of the picture I took, so its defects are magnified; but a lot of fine detail has still been captured, and the colours are good, so I have nothing to complain about.

It was getting too cold to linger, so I walked back to Sophie, parked up the lane, fired her up, and was home within the hour. That could have been the end of the day's shooting, but as bedtime approached I got urgent texts from friends Jo and Clive bidding me to look outside at the moon, which had a halo around it. An unusual sight indeed! LXV was no good for night-time shots of the sky, but my phone was usable, and I got this:

The small dot at four o'clock is a planet - Jupiter perhaps. Well, I'd captured the halo, but the picture wasn't a patch on what the eyes could see. I made two copies and worked on them, to bring out more of the halo, and this was the result:

Not exactly a natural rendition! But I'm now thinking that in frosty conditions there must be several haloes, most of them normally invisible. Even if this is tosh, I've surely come away with some striking images.