Winter Moon
This gorgeous composite image shows this month’s full Moon, also known as a ‘Cold Moon’, seeming to hover above a set of satellite tracking dishes on the campus of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aerospacial (INTA), in the southern part of the Canary Islands’ Gran Canaria, at Montaña Blanca.
One of the antennas – the 15 m-diameter dish seen at left – is ESA’s Maspalomas tracking station, which currently communicates with ESA’s Cluster, LISA Pathfinder and XMM-Newton missions.
It was created on 14 December by amateur photographer Claus Vogl, from Fürth, Germany, who writes: “I spent my vacation last week at Gran Canaria. I spotted the ESA site many years ago and always was fascinated by this big antennas facing into space. The entire shooting window was just two minutes. I shot from on top of a little mountain 1.6 kilometres West of the big antenna, just outside a very little village called Montaña la Arena on a narrow dirt road. The camera equipment was a Canon EOS 5D Mark 3 with an EF 70-200/2.8 IS L lens (exposure time 1.0 sec/aperture F5.6/ISO 400).”
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