On June 9, 2017, the talented photographer Stan Honda waited on a hill in New Jersey’s Eagle Rock Reservation for the sun to set in order to capture an absolutely gorgeous photo of the highly anticipated Strawberry Moon of June as it rose over the skyline of lower Manhattan, where the shiny buildings seemed to reflect the warm rosy color of the moon back at itself. The photo entitled “Manhattan Moonrise” was so impressive that it was declared as June 16, 2017 Astronomy Picture of the Day by NASA.
Close to the horizon and taking on the warm color of reflected sunlight filtered through a dense and dusty atmosphere, the fully illuminated lunar disk poses with the skyscrapers along the southern Manhattan skyline in this telephoto snapshot. The picture was taken from Eagle Rock Reservation, a park in West Orange, New Jersey, planet Earth. That’s about 13 miles from southern Manhattan and some 240,000 miles from the Moon.
