Getting good photos of the moon

IloveTLRs · Oct 26, 2007

I want to get some good photos of the moon and with the moon in them. Previously when I was on the Dark Side I tried a few times and failed miserably :rolleyes:

With previous attempts the moon almost always came out as a white blob. I've tried shooting wide open and closed down but no dice. I'm trying to get photos of it where you can see details. Is that possible without a telescope? (I have no way of getting one.)

I have had limited semi-success taking photos of the moon while the sky is still blueish, but at night, no luck at all.

I found this site: http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/howtophoto/ which is pretty good, but I'm wondering if anyone here has some insider secrets?

unhinged · Oct 26, 2007

I think it's in this one of his books that Bryan Peterson explains how to get god pictures of the moon. He also goes on to explain about lots of other stuff like pictures in the snow and how the (automatic) cameras are fooled etc. Sorry it doesn't directly answer your question.

cowanw · Oct 26, 2007

I have been told that the full moon is fully lite by the sun and the sunny 16 rule applies.
Regards
Bill

rwyoung · Oct 26, 2007

Sunny-16 works just fine. It is a sun-lit rock after all.

Sunny-11 would also be OK.

Akki14 · Oct 26, 2007

sunny-16 plus a giant zoom lens. I tried photoing the lunar eclipse with my 200mm lens and it came out to be a speck. A speck with details once I set up the enlarged to print it as big as possible, but still a speck (and a 1inch moon that took 1minute to expose on the paper... and supergrainy.)

David A. Goldfarb · Oct 26, 2007

"Moony-11" I find.

Ole · Oct 26, 2007

"Moony-11" is about right - but "Fullmoon-16". At full moon the moon is a bit over a full stop brighter than a day (or night) before or after.

The size of the moon on the film is about 1mm per 100mm focal length, so with a 200mm lens you get a 2mm moon.

Time to bring out the really big lenses - except that the moon moves, and the longer the focal length the faster your shutter time must be. 2000mm f:2.8, anyone?

keithwms · Oct 26, 2007

Sunny 16 or luny 11 do not necessarily work. The luminosity that we read on earth depends quite lot on the moon's phase, and on atmospheric scattering which is of course a function of many things. Just spot meter or bracket judiciously!

One other thing, in my experience, for a frame-filling shot you are probably going to need shutter speed of around 1/320 or so. It moves surprisingly quickly!

TheFlyingCamera · Oct 26, 2007

I suppose then I could use my 39" element of my convertible Rapid Rectilinear (I think the max on that element is either f16 or f22) if I made a converter back to allow me to mount my 35mm body on my 11x14. Combine that with one of those motorized equatorial mounts for a telescope and I'm in the ballpark to get a frame-filling shot of the moon?

Removed Account · Oct 26, 2007

A 75" - 80" lens would be closer, and that's just for 35mm. Just for kicks, if you wanted to shoot a full-frame moon on your 11x14 with an inch to spare you would need a 1000" lens. At f/4 the diaphragm opening of such a lens would be nearly 90"! That is, if my math is right...

- Justin

David A. Goldfarb · Oct 26, 2007

If you search on "moon" in the galleries, you'll turn up some good examples with technical information, like this one--

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

It's mentioned in the comments to this image that there is another thread on this topic somewhere, so try the search engine, and you might find more good info.

richard ide · Oct 27, 2007

IIRC The only practical way to get a large image of the moon on film is to have a setup where you can focus the image from the eyepiece of a telescope onto the film. I have set up my 1200mm Apo Tessar outside pointing at the moon and lay on the ground just looking through a microscope eyepiece. The image was too big to view the whole moon at once.

Sirius Glass · Oct 27, 2007

Search APUG for my previous posts of exposure settings for the Moon. The postings discuss using Sunny-11 to account for the albedo and slowest shutter speeds that can be used to stop the Moon's orbital motion [1 degree/ 4 minutes] for various focal lengths.

Steve

Getting good photos of the moon

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