Diffraction

You get an interesting diffraction effect (radiating beams from a single light source) that looks a little like the traditional representation of a star by photographing the light source with a small aperture (eg f/22). This is counter-intuitive - for night shots you are generally shooting with the largest possible aperture (eg, f/2.8).

This shot is the result of merging the two below images taken at about the same time of the half moon. The first has high diffraction (f/13) and the second, significantly less (f/5.6).

The images were merged using layers to add the foreground detail to the shot and the exposure time then boosted slightly to lighten the resulting combination.

Peter Quinton
Palerang
December 2014