Sunrise to Moonrise on a Summer Solstice

Today  Ms. "I-don't-get-up-before-noon" Mitzi decided to change things around a bit and wake me up at 4:45 AM.  I'm glad she did, because as I stumbled outside with her, I got to witness the sun coming up on this the longest day of the year:

Once Mitzi had done her business, she headed right back to bed.  Once I had finished taking thirty or forty sunrise photos, I was wide awake and figured there was no point going back to bed.  By mid morning, I regretted that decision.  I don't do well without my beauty rest.

Yet here I am, after midnight, still up. This year's Summer Solstice coincides with a full moon - which in June is called a Strawberry Moon as it heralds the beginning of strawberry season.  And the Strawberry Moon and the Summer Solstice occurs on the same day only once every 70 years.  Once in a lifetime.  Now how could I go to bed knowing that?  How could I miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to photograph a Summer Solstice Strawberry Moon?

The sky was not cloudless, so I kept photographing in the hopes that I'd capture a rare moment in time when the moon would not be partially hidden by cloud.  And I kept trying different settings, and trying to keep my hand steady (you may remember the last time I tried to photograph a full moon using a tripod I broke the camera when it fell to the ground), so I accumulated sixty or seventy photos before the cloudless shot appeared.  And after all that, my favourite photo (from a very quick perusal of them) isn't the ONE shot without cloud cover, but this one in which the moon has two stripes of cloud across its face:

And now I'm off to bed.  I sure hope Ms. Mitzi sleeps in!