A few days ago, I went out to Twilight to photograph July's full moon. When the moon rose, the sky was clear, but suddenly, some scattered clouds appeared. Sometimes, they covered, sometimes uncovered, the moon, which shone intensely in the sky.

When the clouds were in front of the moon, a magical, enigmatic, a little scary environment was created. It was then that John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, came to my mind, in particular when he describes the creation of the World and Life on Earth - "God creates the Earth", then "the stars / And set them in the firmament of Heaven / To illuminate the Earth", then, "For of celestial bodies first the sun / A mighty sphere he framed, unlightsome first, / Though of ethereal mould: then formed the moon / Globose, and every magnitude of stars, / And sowed with stars the Heaven, thick as a field". "And God said, Let the waters generate / Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul: / And let fowl fly above the Earth, with wings / Displayed on the open firmament of Heaven. / And God created the great whales, and each / Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously / The waters generated by their kinds; / And every bird of wing after his kind".

We know today that the Sun formed first, then the Earth and soon after the moon (4.6-4.5 billion years), and that vertebrated animals only appeared after plants about 500 million years ago. However, the epic poem in blank verse of the great 17th-century English poet gives us a magic and wonderful image of the early moments of the Solar System and of complex animals on Earth, which I evoked when I saw the full moon that day.

I manually focused on the moon and, using a very low lens aperture got the tree branches of a large cork oak also in focus. The sensor was pushed to the limit. The use of the RAW format allowed the recovery of details from the shadows and highlights. Obviously, the image quality can not be compared to that obtained during the day.