One of my favorite subjects

The Moon..

When we were enroute to Joshua tree last friday, learned that it was a special night. The "blue moon" as it is called is a rarity.

Once in a while there are two full moon days in the month of August and this second full moon in the same month is also refered to as blue moon (However the real blue moon reference was created by the moon becoming blue under a volcanic ash cloud somewhere in Europe in the middle ages.. that I remember from the good old quizzing days in school)

Digressed as usual.. coming to this special moon.. 

Stopped on the side of a freeway exit on Route 5 someplace near Panoche Road and took a bunch of shots with the 70-200mm using the 2x extender. Tried the HDR stuff but it doesn't work. Maybe there are some manual tricks that need to be done to get rid of the blue and red ring that comes up in PHotoshop when using the merge to HDR option.

See for yourself. The default shot is not bad as my family was oohing and aahing over this photograph.

However when you do the HDR merge on three shots you get this..

Granted the detail in the highlights and shadows pop out but the edge is now off. There is a ring around the edge that has blue on one side and red on the other. Have a dozen shots of the moon in sets of three and it happens on all of the triplets no matter what the default setting was with respect to shutter speed or aperture.

f8, f11, f13, f22 all end up with same ring! Does the moon move that much within two seconds to cause this? Technically this was on a stable tripod shot and even if there are miniscule shakes thanks to the trucks on the freeway, the software is supposed to align the moon based on features in the photograph anyways, right? There is not much to align in three photographs which have a moon in the middle of a black background. So what gives?

Have to pore over a few internet pages from expert moon photographers to figure this one out. Not going to get a blue moon anytime soon. But if you know of ways to fix this in HDR, do let me know.