Tonights moon

Taken tonight when the moon was about 30 degrees above the horizon

Bazza

Very cool - really close - heavily cropped? It's a shame it's a little blurred, but it must be exceptionally difficult and require a lot of skill and discipline to get good crisp shots of the moon! Well done.

xx

DJ knows how to do it.

Absolutely no cropping involved, the only thing done in PP was a little sharpening and fine tuning the contrast. This is exactly as taken apart from as described. The object of the photo was to get a clear defination of the edge of the moon where the focus was concentrated on, which I think was quite successful.

How did I do it? Well I used my 600-1200mm manual cheap lens with the 2x double magnifier PLUS my Sigma 1.4 teleconverter. This gave me about 3360mm to work with.

The Nkon D300 was set on manual using the Live View feature and the + times increase to fine tune the picture before taking what you see in the original post.

The problem waiting for the moon to be overhead ,subject to clouds etc, is that it moves very fast across the photograpic area, working this close means constant moving of the gear and resetting leaving very little time to get a good shot. Only way is to get ahead of the moons path and wait for it to catch up. At least with what I was using.
Bazza

Interesting info there Bazza!

Yeah MD, I was thinking of DJ's stuff when I was posting - his stuff is amazing! Well worth learning from!

xx

Isn't it amazing how you can capture something so far away,and get so much detail too

Just goes to show you don't necessarily need expensive equipment. The lens can still be purchased for around £150/200 mark with the doubler and T2 adapter, the sigma 1.4 converter does cost a little bit more, but one can still get good close ups without it of the moon.

Bazza

But expensive equipment, much as it pains me to say it, makes a huge difference I'm sure DJ won't mind me saying that his equipment is very expensive, and his photos phenomenal. There is of course a huge amount of skill and technical knowledge in astrophotography as well. While the above photo is good, and if I'd taken it, I'd be happy, from an astrophotography point of view, it's very clear that the lens is cheaper.

xx

That's true, but it is still pretty impressive, what you can do without the expensive stuff. I mean, come on it's the moon, it is all the way up there, and you can take pics down here where you can see craters. that in it's self is amazing!

Don't forget the moon wasn't directly overhead and much closer consequently, it was taken when the moon was only about 30 degrees off the horizon which is pretty low and a lot further away .

Data
The nearest the moon is to the earth is around 363,000 miles and the furtherest about 406,000 miles. So based on that we are talking an average distance of 400,000 miles to take the picture, which puts it in perspective.

Bazza