Our first full moon for the new year and it just happens to be a ‘supermoon’. Not that there is anything really special about a supermoon other than appearing around 10% larger due to the moon’s elliptic orbit and the chance that the full moon coincides with the narrow part of its orbit. Supermoons happen regularly along with its ‘minimoon’ counterpart.

So what makes this moon cryptic? Not the fact that its a supermoon but the date; 2/1/2018. The day and month are prime numbers while the year is the product of two primes, one being the day. The product of primes is the cornerstone of modern cryptography though the primes used to secure your banking website are just a tad larger!

For those interested in the technical details this image was made by from 160 frames taken at 1/500s f/8 ISO100 600mm. I then used AutoStakkert3 to select the best 50 frames, perform geometric correction, stack and then drizzle 3x. The output was then processed using the wavelet filter (a kind of deconvolution) in Registax6.

Photo: Robert Rath, ‘Crypto Supermoon’, 1/500s f/8 ISO100 600mm