Above, you see my illustration of yesterday’s Full Wolf Moon, which has a secret photographic fault. Below, you’ll see a daylight image of the area over which yesterday’s first supermoon of the year arose shortly after sundown.
When the Wolf Moon rose, it ascended like a ball ofmolten copper from more than 225,000 miles behind the Mount Desert Island horizon:
When the rising moon is low on the horizon, we see it through hundreds of thousands of miles of the Earth’s gritty atmosphere, which distorts and discolors the orb when it’s seen through our eyes or standard cameras.
As the moon got higher and escaped our atomospher, it got lighter and eventully became seemingly phosphorus-white:
The secret fault in the illustration? That’s yesterday’s moon, alright. But I don’t have any wild wolf closeup portraits (for obvious reasons). So, I used my archive portrait of Freddie, the friendly Alaskan malamute, a former neighbor’s dog that would head-butt you repeatedly to get you to keep scratching the sweet spot between his ears. I also changed the color of Freddie’s eyes to wolf-yellow.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on January 3, 2026.) Click on the images to enlarge them.