What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks?

I was lying in bed this morning (wondering what on earth I was going to blog about) when I decided to get up and get a drink of water. It was about 4:30 and not quite time to get up. Olga and Dave were both snoring away.

I came out to the kitchen and noticed a lot of light spilling across the living room floor. I thought, "Wow, there must be a full moon!" But when I came to the back door, I realized what I was seeing wasn't the moon at all. It was the light from a neighbors' distant window!

They have a globe-shaped ceiling fixture that clearly contains an approximately 3,000-watt bulb -- bright enough to illuminate our bird feeders and the plants in our back garden. This is a good example of something I wouldn't even have noticed when our next-door neighbor's gigantic Leyland cypress tree was intact. But now that the tree is gone, that light comes right at us.

As you can see, they were the only lit window in the whole neighborhood. Everyone else was sensibly asleep, or at least wandering around in a dark house.

The moon, by the way, is waxing gibbous at about 60 percent at the moment, and as I write this I'm not sure it's even above the horizon. I don't see it, but perhaps I am temporarily blinded by my neighbor's chandelier. (Looking now at a moonrise/moonset timetable, I see that it slipped below the horizon at 1:14 a.m.)

Getting that picture was no easy task. I had to shoot manually and I don't have a tripod, so I had to hold the camera as super-still as possible with a very high ISO and slow exposure (3.2 seconds) while standing outside the back door with my bare feet on the patio. Brrrr!