Pictuers of the moon.

bantor

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I just bought a tripod so I decided I would try a couple pictures of the moon. It is pretty close to full right now and a clear night so I thought it would be the perfect oportunity to try this out. I set my Nikon D50 to long exposure settting and turned the ISO up to 800, and another shot at 1600. I tried shutter times between 3 and 30 seconds.

I figured after about 10 shots I should get at least one good one, but not at all. Here is the best I got.

image19wj.jpg


It looks more like a dimmed sun than anything. My question is how is it possible to get the nice crisp looking moons one often sees, or is it at all possible to do with a DSLR?

Thanks for the help.
 
The moon should be exposed approximately the same as you would for a sunny day. That's because the moon is very reflective, and the light shining on it is the same intensity as the light that shines on the earth during daytime. Thus the best guide for exposure would be the sunny-16 rule, that is: when it is sunny out, a good exposure to use is with the lens at f/16 and the shutter speed at one over the ISO you are using. Since the moon is just as sunny as the earth, the sunny/16 rule works well.
 
All that was really helpful, Mark C and Unimaximum. I too tried to capture the huge orange moon as it came over the horizon tonight and it went all blurry, like in Bantor's shot. Here's my first ever upload to show the problem. As you point out, I wrongly relied on the meter.

$moonrise.JPG

[Well, I obviously didn't get the hang of the sizing on my first upload. :blushing: ]
 
I've been taking shots of the moon. I have found F8 at 400/sec asa 100 gives good exposure. So on all accounts the rule works. IE f16 is one stop down on f8. 200/sec same one down = 2x asa.
 
bantor said:
I just bought a tripod so I decided I would try a couple pictures of the moon. It is pretty close to full right now and a clear night so I thought it would be the perfect oportunity to try this out. I set my Nikon D50 to long exposure settting and turned the ISO up to 800, and another shot at 1600. I tried shutter times between 3 and 30 seconds.

I figured after about 10 shots I should get at least one good one, but not at all. Here is the best I got.



It looks more like a dimmed sun than anything. My question is how is it possible to get the nice crisp looking moons one often sees, or is it at all possible to do with a DSLR?

Thanks for the help.

You are aware increasing the ISO makes it more sensitive to light? So you should have put it down to 100 not up high. Then you need to use a shutter speed of may 1/13 or soemthing like tat. May be different for you but you don 't need very long shutter speeds.
 
Try the following:

Set aperture to f5.6, set exposure to 1/500th, set WB to natural/outdoor. Use longest lens you've got, don't bother with tripod. Set to 100 ISO. Shoot. Then adjust the shutter speed until you get a sharp image.

Essentially, you want to be shooting very fast - the moon moves very quickly across the sky and as has been mentioned, is very bright.

Rob
 
Daniel. Indeed I am aware of ISO numbers and light sensitivity, I just (for some reason) thought that the moon would need to be taken like any other night shot with a higher ISO and longer shutter speed, turns out I was very worng though.
 

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