A Picture Of The Mun

[CaptainApollo]

Very sorry for no pictures, the last few days were very cloudy! But I got one now, it doesn't look as nice as it does for real though! Hope you like!

[DaMichel]

Awesome, so pretty pictures!

Here is my silly attempt to take a picture of the mun moon using some standard zoom lens during a slightly hazy night. Will try again on a better night.

Edited July 1, 2015 by DaMichel

[CaptainApollo]

Thank you! It's pretty good, you can still see some of the main features!

[kiwi1960]

Sadly, the best shots are taken near the equator ... what chance does a poor fool like me stand, down here in New Zealand near the South Pole....

Challenge accepted!

I shall fire up my old Olympus camera with the HD lens.... no telescope, but I do have a tripod.

Expect photos shortly.

[kookoo_gr]

make sure to store the photos at loseless format eg. tiff, bmp or even raw... if your camera can store the photo at both formats (tiff and raw) even better, later at processing you can have a wider range to process.

[Camacha]

Here is my silly attempt to take a picture of the mun moon using some standard zoom lens during a slightly hazy night. Will try again on a better night.

http://i.imgur.com/vCQcLDn.jpg

I like that it looks so very much like the little ball of dust it is.

[CaptainApollo]

You should still try! Tripod works, good luck!

[CaptainApollo]

So, with the Moon waxing, I decided to resume this!

[CaptainApollo]

And another one, waxing even more!

[CaptainApollo]

And another, waxing more..

[T-Bouw]

Watching this thread makes me want to bust out the scope as well.

Man, it's been almost a week now of bad weather and general cloudyness at my place!

If this goes on, I might try to watch indoors.

[CaptainApollo]

You should, if the weather clears up, go for it! But I'm not actually using a scope!

Yeah, I had that last month, it was very cloudy.

[UmbralRaptor]

You should, if the weather clears up, go for it! But I'm not actually using a scope!

Yeah, I had that last month, it was very cloudy.

You'd be surprised. I've seen 80 mm refractors used as telephoto lenses for wildlife images, and an array of prosumer telephoto lenses used as a professional telescope.

[Shpaget]

Since we're sharing...

I took this one about a month ago.

I used a Canon 70D with a 100-400 mm lens. This is about a 100% crop. Even at 400 mm on a 1.6 crop sensor the Moon does not occupy a lot of frame real estate. In any case, this is by far my best Moon shot. Unfortunately neither the camera, not the lens are mine, so I can't take more of them.

That won't stop me from shooting it with my equipment, will it now?

I take out my trusty old 40D, put a 100mm macro lens on it, and get nothing usable. Shopping time!!

I bit the bullet, shell out a couple of hundred $ and get myself a Samyang 800 mm mirror lens. By the time it arrived in the post, the cloudy days have come and I have to wait a few days to try it. Then the hot weather comes and the atmosphere is boiling, making every picture ugly. Then the new Moon. UGH!!

Finally, a couple of days ago, I got a chance to shoot the Moon and this is straight out of the camera (after shrinking the resolution).

As you can see, I'm having quite a bit of trouble nailing the focus, or getting it anywhere near where it supposed to be. The magnification is just so large that as soon as I touch the lens to focus, the image starts jumping around. That's why I'm in the process of building some sort of electro mechanical focusing system that I will attach to the lens so I don't have to touch it to focus, and to give me a more precise control.

In the meantime, I'm using the first picture as my desktop background.

The Samyang also proved capable of resolving planetary disks, well Venus at least.

[UmbralRaptor]

Okay, let's see what can be resolved with a Canon SD1100 IS while the Moon is full.

Lots of Maria, though many craters (eg: Aristarchus, Tycho) are many showing up through brightness contrast, rather than being resolvable. (Note also the lack of Copernicus, Clavius, and Plato) How about trying out digital zoom?

Nope.

On a related note, any advice on white-balance settings?

[Shpaget]

5600K

After all, you're shooting landscape lit by sunshine.

[UmbralRaptor]

5600K

After all, you're shooting landscape lit by sunshine.

My options appear to be: Auto, Day Light, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, Custom.

(Custom and Auto take cues from some feature of current lighting)

The moon seems much like last night.

Venus was unresolvable, but the sunset was nice.

Also, it looks like I have to be careful to get enough light even at ISO 80 to avoid excessive grain?

[Shpaget]

Dayligh should be equal to 5600K. Also, custom should allow you to set it to anything you want.

Just as there is the Sunny 16 rule, there is the Looney 11, which translates to f11 and 1/n for shutter speed where n is ISO setting.

Yeah, there's quite a bit of grain there. That's ISO 80, not 800? Rather poor perfomance. Or it could be just my mobile phone screen.

[UmbralRaptor]

There's literally no color temperature setting, though there is a "Daylight" one, so that should work in the future. I've more or less ignored Sunny 16/Looney 11 because I'm more or less stuck with f/2.8 to 4.9. Maybe with some digging up of conversion factors? And yes, I'm still not clear on the huge amount of grain in that image (ISO 80, f/4.9, 1/40 s). If anything, it looks better on mobile screens. o_O

[PakledHostage]

I've more or less ignored Sunny 16/Looney 11 because I'm more or less stuck with f/2.8 to 4.9. Maybe with some digging up of conversion factors? And yes, I'm still not clear on the huge amount of grain in that image (ISO 80, f/4.9, 1/40 s).

I dialed shpaget's recommend settings into my exposure wheel app and I get an exposure value of just over 13, while your settings yeild an EV of roughly 10. That suggests that you might be overexposing a fair bit. One the other hand, you mentioned that your camera seems to be struggling in the low light? The two situations seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum? Maybe the problem is that your JPEG settings are set to a low quality (high compression) setting? Or maybe your camera's quoted ISO or appeture settings aren't accurate?

[UmbralRaptor]

Maybe (I'm trying to push a 2008 P&S into roles normally reserved for mid-level DSLRs), but wikiality suggests that the environment at that time would have been best with an EV of 9-11. I have the JPEGs at maximum size/quality (no noise reduction options), so compression seems unlikely. Would selecting a lower resolution result in binning? (Alternatively, should I install something like GIMP and shoot RAW? Write off exposures that aren't full daylight?)

[PakledHostage]

Alternatively, should I install something like GIMP and shoot RAW? Write off exposures that aren't full daylight?

Might be worth a try... My camera allows me to shoot in both RAW and JPEG simultaneously so I leave both options turned on all the time. Shooting in RAW won't solve problems caused by a bad sensor, focus or lens - garbage in garbage out - but it would get around a bad onboard JPEG compression algorithm and give you the flexibility to experiment with white balance, etc in your image processing software.

[CaptainApollo]

Very interesting conversation, this gave me some good tips.. And nice pics of the moon!