A view of the full moon behind the Olympic rings at the Laura Cross Country Ski and Biathlon Center during the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

When we arrived here on the ground in Russia just under two weeks ago, one of the things we were told to keep in mind was the full moon occurring on February 14th. Photographers on our team were encouraged to come up with ideas that would place the moon in some visual context with the Olympics. Of course, the famous Olympics rings are the obvious first choice for this kind of thing.

There are several sets of three-dimensional rings at various venues throughout the mountain cluster, some large and some small. The question for me immediately became which set of rings would provide a view of the moon behind them, and more importantly, enough unobstructed distance in front of them to use a super-telephoto lens to compress the moon in the background against the rings.

I quickly narrowed down my search for usable rings to the cross country skiing course. The view they offered of the eastern sky and their position high on a hill gave me the best chance of lining them up with the moon.

After several days at the cross country skiing course, I realized that the rings there were an ideal choice. The rings were set up high on a hill, there was plenty of unobstructed space in front of them for my lens requirements, and the northeastern sky behind them would likely offer a view of the rising moon.

To double check all this, I consulted a great piece of software called The Photographer’s Ephemeris. The program not only gives you sun and moon rise and set times, but it also provides an overlay on Google Maps of exactly what angle the moon will rise and set given your location and elevation on the planet. Dropping the pointer on the map allows you to calculate exactly where you need to stand to have a celestial body intersect something between you and it. You can also adjust a slider for time of day to see the angles for a given time (not just the rise and set times). It’s a very powerful program, but all these calculations were just half the battle of making this image happen.

A special piece of software called The Photographer’s Ephemeris allowed me to calculate the exact heading at which the moon would rise, and where I needed to stand on the course to make the moon intersect with the rings.

As you can see on the diagram, I’d have to stand directly in the middle of the cross country skiing course to make this work, and you can’t just stroll onto an Olympics course after hours