“I love the autumn – that melancholy season that suits memories so well.”
~ Gustave Flaubert
~French novelist
~1821-1860
The moon peeks over the Springhouse at Trexler Memorial Park, Allentown, Pennsylvania, as dusk settles in in this painterly, HDR scene I captured on a beautiful mid-November evening.
The log cabin was part of Springhouse, the summer home of General Harry Clay Trexler (1854-1933), an American industrialist who built a business empire in Allentown. The park is his namesake.
“Well it’s a marvelous night for a moondance …
Can I just have one more moondance with you, my love? …”
~ “Moondance”
~ Van Morrison
~ 1970
Clouds tinged pink with the color of sunset dance around the moon and sweep down to the landscape in the beautiful surreal.
I shot this first quarter moon and clouds at the moment of sunset on August 15, 2021 on a warm and beautiful evening along the Ironton Rail Trail, which loops more than nine miles through Whitehall Township, the Borough of Coplay and North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania.
Background texture by Jai Johnson added for artistic effect.
The Ironton Railroad was a shortline railroad in Lehigh County. Originally built in 1861 to haul iron ore and limestone to blast furnaces along the Lehigh River, traffic later shifted to carrying Portland Cement when local iron mining declined in the early 20th century. Much of the railroad had already been abandoned when it became part of Conrail in 1976, and the last of its trackage was removed in 1984.
In 1996, Whitehall Township purchased 9.2 miles of the right-of-way from Conrail, transforming it into the Ironton Rail Trail.
“Let me take you down
'Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever …”
~ “Strawberry Fields Forever”
~ released 1967
~written by John Lennon & credited to
Lennon-McCartney
~ John Lennon based the song on his childhood memories of playing in the garden of Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home in Liverpool.
The Super Strawberry Moon “ripens” in a beautiful field in abstract, where nothing is real.
I created this image by blending my shot of the Super Strawberry Moon holding court in the sky over the West End of Allentown, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley at 10:33 p.m. June 24, 2021, with background texture by Jai Johnson for artistic effect.
This Super Strawberry Moon is the last near-Supermoon of 2021. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the name “Strawberry Moon” originated with Algonquin tribes in eastern North America, who knew the June full moon as a signal to gather ripening fruit of wild strawberries.
This Super Strawberry Moon rose just before 9 p.m. in the Lehigh Valley, about a half-hour passed sunset. It is the first full moon of summer 2021.
