No, this isn’t the title to a romantic novel or a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the NASA Lunar Landing, this is an unusual but entirely natural phenomenon here on the coast of Broome, Western Australia.

Cameras at the Ready

After the sun has passed beyond the horizon and the Milky Way is lighting-up the sky, a crowd can be found gathering along the coast with cameras in-hand eagerly waiting in anticipation of this 2-3 times a month event between March and October, which falls mostly, and conveniently, during the dry season.

At precisely the advertised time a dim glimmer on the black horizon begins to glow and camera shutters start to clatter. Within minutes a deep orange crescent begins to appear, slowly expanding into a glowing ball and casting bright streaks across the wet tide exposed mud flats. This isn’t a sunrise, though it could easily be mistaken for one, this is likely the strangest moonrise you’ll witness, this is the Staircase to the Moon.

Due to the extreme tides, which are among the largest in the world, and a shallow bay, the tide reaches out for several kilometres leaving the extensive mud flats high and dry during the low tide. As the moon begins to rise it’s white reflected light from the sun passes side-on through the Earth’s shallow atmosphere filtering the blue hues and leaving just the yellows and reds that create our orange moonrise. And as the moon continues to rise higher into the sky the moonlight takes a shorter path through the atmosphere and less colour is filtered rendering the moon its more familiar blue/white hue.

Photographing the moon is rarely easy. For one it is much smaller than it appears in your viewfinder but it is also extremely bright against the blackness of space, bright enough that it can be clearly seen during daylight hours. Secondly the dark sky misleads camera meters resulting in overexposure of the moon and only a very limited, and very expensive, number of cameras are able to record such extreme contrast.

Unfortunately on our visit it was sufficiently windy that, even with a sturdy tripod, the long lens moved enough to blur many of my attempts to photograph this phenomenon. Hopefully we may get a second chance later on our trip as we head further west.

Date and times for the Staircase to the Moon can be found on the Broome Visitor Centre website.