There weren't any good alignment opportunities I could find for this month's full moon, but I still wanted to try out my new telephoto lens and see what I could get, so earlier this week I took some quick shots in West Vancouver (although the great thing about the moon is that you can photograph it from anywhere on Earth!)
I like to get just a hint of midnight blue sky colour behind the moon, so this was taken when the sky was still relatively light (the brightness of the moon will, when correctly exposed, result in a darker sky than you would expect).
After camera issues (wobbly tripods, missed focus, soft lenses, etc.), atmospheric conditions are probably the biggest enemy to getting really sharp high-magnification shots of the moon. Watching through the magnified live view on my camera, I could see the fine detail of the moon shimmering as the air currents moved and shifted above me. To counteract this, I used a technique known as 'stacking', where you take many consecutive shots of the moon, which can then be combined in software to average out the atmospheric distortions.
For this stack I took 49 consecutive photos of the moon at 600mm, f/9, ISO 100, 1/40th.
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
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Awesome detail. Can see tiny ridges and bumps on edge. And love the midnight blue. At 600mm I can imagine the slightlest tiny shake must blur image. Great stuff Fav
@michaelelliott Thanks Michael! Most of the rest of my shoot from this location, looking across at Vancouver, was a write-off due to a very gentle breeze that was still sufficient to shake the lens very slightly during longer exposures!
@redy4et Thank you Elizabeth! No EQ mount for this, it's on my list of things I'd like to have! I used RegiStax to stack the images, it's more designed to correct for small misalignments caused by EQ mounts not tracking quite perfectly, but as long as the shift between images is fairly constant (no big jumps), it does a pretty good job of aligning untracked shots like this too.
Alexis, I see you used RegiStax, was this on a Windows system? Since I'm on a Mac I use Keith's Image Stacking Software. I've not checked if RegiStax supports Mac or not. Do you like their software and it difficult to go through the process of alignment of the stacked images? The filtering looks pretty good.
@redy4et Thank you Elizabeth! No EQ mount for this, it's on my list of things I'd like to have! I used RegiStax to stack the images, it's more designed to correct for small misalignments caused by EQ mounts not tracking quite perfectly, but as long as the shift between images is fairly constant (no big jumps), it does a pretty good job of aligning untracked shots like this too.