So according to several news sources, the first full moon is called a "wolf moon".  This name comes from native American lore where each full moon of the year has a name.  The "wolf moon" is named such due to the sounds of winter wolves howling under a full moon (source) .  So with clear skies, like any intrepid photographer, I headed up into the geyser basin after dark to photograph the landscape under the light of the "wolf moon".

Above is Old Faithful Geyser in full eruption lit by the full moon.  The image was roughly 6 seconds at f5.6 at ISO 1600.  Notice the lack of snow on the ground here.  While this is a thermal area, in a typical snow year, the ground here will not be bare.  Even with recent snow falls, the warmer ground in the geyser basins show a lot of bare ground.

This image above is of Grand Geyser.  As I made my way past Castle Geyser, I heard the sound of Grand before I ever saw it.  A three burst eruption gave me time to get over and record the eruption under the full moon.  In this image, Grand is the back and most of what can be seen is just steam.  The jetting water in the front is Vent Geyser.  This image was shot at 4 seconds with an f-stop of 4.5.  I also used ISO 1600 here.  There was a lot of steam, giving the image the look it has here.

Finally, this is Castle Geyser in the back and center of this image.  Again, the full moon provides backlighting through the three steam plumes.  This image was also shot at an exposure of 4 seconds, 4.5 f-stop, and ISO 1600.  Focusing for all the images I took under the full moon was done manually.  No adjustments were made to any of these images on the computer except some noise reduction.

Happy Holidays from Old Faithful!  Here's some images taken today in the Upper Geyser Basin at Old Faithful.  This first image is of a mid-morning eruption of Old Faithful Geyser.  Perhaps the first thing to notice in this image is the lack of any serious snowpack.  The official NPS measurement of snowpack at Old Faithful is just over 7 inches (just under 18 centimeters).  Yep, that's it.  I woke up this morning to a low temperature of minus 8 degrees farenheit (minus 22 celcius) and it was clear, so I headed off into the geyser basin.  It dropped as low as minus 12 F (minus 24 C) while I was out but the cold temps and nice fog made for some great images.  I missed the first Old Faithful eruption, so finished my morning with the eruption seen above.  The runoff channels made nice leading lines and I was able to put my new 17-40 L lens to the test.

This image is of Castle Geyser, another one of my favorite photo subjects in the Upper Geyser Basin.  The shapes and textures in the snow made a great foreground for this image, which was shot shortly after the sun rose above a low ridge of clouds to the east.  It was also shot with the new lens, which performed really well.

This final image from this morning is of Sawmill Geyser.  Sawmill is frequently in eruption and can be quite photogenic.  The 17-40 did a good job shooting into the sun.  While there was some lens flare, it wasn't bad, and the resulting sunstar was pretty nice.  Cold temps are forecasted for tonight, so I'll head out again in the morning to see what I can find.  But with little snow in the forecast for the next week, things could get a bit dire.  We definitely need some snow here.