Moon Photography

Last night was fairly clear.  But with a nearly full moon bright in the sky, as I found out, this severely limits the amount of detail you obtain from any deep space photography you try.  I attempted to shoot Pleiades.  I got some nice sharp stars but disappointingly, couldn’t pull out any detail of the blue gas clouds that surround them.  But all wasn’t lost, I took a few Moon pics and wrote this post!

Our nearest celestial neighbour is a prime candidate for photography, whether as part of an atmospheric night landscape or seascape or as the sole subject.

Photographing the moon is actually easy.  If you have a decent camera with a fairly long telephoto lens, you can get some great shots.  And you can probably get some decent images with a modern phone camera too!

If you’re going for a full or more than half moon, you can shoot almost as if it is daylight – even without a tripod (although it’s better if you do use one). I was able to shoot through an open window, with my tripod on the windowsill!

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Last night was pretty near a full moon and I was using a 70-300 lens (I thought I had it at 300mm, but seems it was at 238mm), but as my camera is a crop sensor, the effective focal length is 1.6x, so that makes it the equivalent of 380mm on a full-frame sensor.

I experimented a bit with shutter speed, ISO and aperture combinations and also tried using the Moon setting on my tracking mount (to use a longer shutter speed).  This was nowhere near as sharp – whilst it tracked the path OK, the Moon itself actually wobbles a bit so my conclusion is to use a single shot with a fast shutter speed.  The images below are the same shot with just minimal editing in Lightroom; Contrast, Sharpening etc – firstly, original dimensions, secondly, cropped in a bit.

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A full moon is an amazing sight – particularly when low in the sky and it can make make for great night landscapes and seascapes, but a close up study of a full moon tends to be a bit disappointing once you view it, as you can see above.  While a big white disk in the sky looks spectacular, that same flat looking disk with some grey blotches isn’t so much! 

I prefer to wait a day or two after the full moon (or a few days before)  It’s then that you get to see the real detail in your photo – craters and mountains.  You see the full moon has no real shadows on it and the light falls evenly on its surface.  A day or two later and the shadows are more pronounced.  This image was shot a couple of years ago – you can see the detail and ‘texture’ of the moon much more.  It seems much more 3D than the shots taken last night. I think it really gives the impressionof a sphere hanging in the sky.

You’ll get your best shots by under-exposing a bit – you’ll capture more detail if the overall image appears grey rather than white. You can bring the brightness up a bit in post-processing if necessary.

Even with a telephoto lens (eg 200-300mm or so) the moon will still appear quite small in the frame so you will need to do some cropping in editing software for best results.  So you need to get your shot at the best quality possible.  So let’s look at settings:

1. Use a tripod if you can (although it is possible to shoot handheld) and a remote shutter release is ideal too if you have one.
2. Shoot in RAW rather than jpg so that no detail is lost.  Also shoot in Manual Mode so that the camera does not override your settings
3. Try a few different apertures, most lenses have a ‘sweet spot’ where images are sharper – it might be between f11 and f16.  Take some test shots then zoom in on your camera’s screen to find the sharpest setting.
4. Unlike with most Astrophotography, you can usually use autofocus, but try with manual focus too.
5. Adjust your shutter speed accordingly – if you are using a tripod you can bring it down a bit slower than handheld, but even then too slow and its sharpness might be affected by the earth’s rotation and ‘moon wobble’.  So keep it fairly fast.
6. Adjust the ISO, but you should still be able to keep it fairly low – up to ISO800 or ISO1600 at a push should be OK
7. Take a few shots – even with fast settings, you will find some shots slightly sharper than others

So you see, you might be shooting at night, but you definitely don’t need night-time settings.  The above leaves plenty of headroom to adjust – maybe bring the shutter speed down to 1/800, reduce the ISO, however modern DSLRs ‘like’ shooting at ISO800 apparently, so bear that in mind.  I try to keep the aperture at f14 as it seems to be this particular lens’s ‘sweetspot’ and shutter speed above 1/800.