first moon shot

[charlie_merrifi]

not the greatest but not bad. What could i have done ot make it better.
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z61/stick_flicker/IMG_1019.jpg

[charlie_merrifi]

wow no that i see it that big it looks horrible

[talz13]

I'm going to try for a decent moon shot tonight, if I can see it. Hopefully 250mm doesn't make it much smaller than your 300mm.

Was that on a tripod? manual focus?

[Redfire_Cobra]

as odd as this sounds try increasing the shutter speed to 1/500 and working down from there.

[Snydremark]

Hey Charlie,

Right off the bat, the focus and white balance appear off.

I've just been going through similar pains the last couple of days, you can check out the CC thread over here (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=7519614#post7519614) for some good tips and to see what I came up with.

A few things that I learned, though:

1. Use a tripod
2. Turn on Live View
3. Turn off Auto-focus
4. Use the magnification feature in LV to get a better look at where your focal plane is
5. Use either timer (2sec) or a cable release to minimize lens movement while making the shot.
5. Try a couple of shots with different focus settings once you have it sighted in

Post processing with color balance, tone curve tweaking and some sharpening (edge and detail in Lightroom)/noise reduction should help bring out the remaining detail.

You can also d/l my shot and examin the EXIF data if that helps.

I hope this useful for you and good luck shooting! :)

-E

[Sean Silas]

i was trying to get a decent moon shot this morning before work and I kept getting the moon too bright. what setting are you guys using so I can at least get some detail instead of a light bulb :D

[Bill Boehme]

The image is overexposed by at least three stops and is either badly out of focus or there was a lot of camera shake during the exposure. For moon shots, I suggest setting the lens aperture to f/8, ISO to 100, and a shutter speed of about 1/400 second for a full moon. The exposure time will vary according to the phase of the moon. A thin slice new moon might require as much as 1/60 second exposure time. Shoot the moon when it is near the zenith to minimize atmospheric interference. Additionally, the following things are necessary to get a sharp image of the moon:
Set the camera AF to use the center point only and then focus on the edge of the lunar disk. After achieving sharp AF, turn AF to OFF and do not touch the focusing ring on the lens.
The camera needs to be on a tripod and use a remote shutter switch.
Use the mirror lock-up feature of your camera to minimize vibration induced blur.If you have Photoshop CS3 or CS4, use the stack mode with mean value filtering to process at least ten images. If you do not have Photoshop, then you can use a free astrophotography image stacking program such as RegiStax to combine the images.

[Moooney]

1. Use a tripod
2. Turn on Live View
3. Turn off Auto-focus
4. Use the magnification feature in LV to get a better look at where your focal plane is
5. Use either timer (2sec) or a cable release to minimize lens movement while making the shot.



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v89/Mooney/IMG_2776.jpg
f/8 1/100 iso 100

this is my first attempt at shooting the moon. it was handheld because my tripod wouldn't aim high enough in the sky. i used autofocus, but forced the center point.

[Bill Boehme]

f/8 1/100 iso 100

this is my first attempt at shooting the moon. it was handheld because my tripod wouldn't aim high enough in the sky. i used autofocus, but forced the center point.

Good work, especially for being hand held!

Pointing straight up is a problem for some tripod heads. There are several ways to work around the problem such as using an offset mount for the head. In my case, I have a Wimberly Sidekick (http://www.tripodhead.com/products/sidekick-main.cfm) gimbal type mount which I bought for bird and nature photography, but have found it to be very useful for many other applications. The bad news is that it is not cheap because it requires the use of a quality ball head in addition to the Sidekick. The thing that I like about the gimbal mount is that all of the rotation is about the center of mass of the lens/camera unit so that it is always in balance and does not need to be locked down after positioning.

The center focus point of your camera is the most sensitive and accurate, so you used the "right" one. Instead of the need to "force" it to use the center point, you can set up your camera so that the center point is the only one that is active -- that is the way that I leave my camera set up all of the time. For cameras with nine AF points, if you leave all of the focus points active, it will be somewhat of a gamble that the camera's AF algorithms will choose the things that you want to be in sharpest focus.

[Snydremark]

I'll second Bill, there. That's pretty darned good for a handheld shot and first try. Nice work; a little bit of processing to bring the light and details out some more and I would think you were "there" with this one. :cool:

Also seconding the single, center point AF. If you're shooting a single object like the moon, dialing the AF down to only use the center point does make it much easier. It's also useful for AF on a subject among clutter...

[Bill Boehme]

This is from about a year ago. It was created in Photoshop from a stack of ten images using mean value filtering. Some of the dedicated astronomy image stacking programs use much more sophisticated algorithms, but are designed to use stacks consisting of hundreds of images and often choke on the large size images produced by DSLR cameras. The exposure time was 1/100 second at an aperture of f/8 and ISO 100. The lens focal length was 400 mm. Additional sharpening was done in Photoshop following the stack mode processing.


349641

[kinkbmxrydr]

OP picture doesnt look sharp

[nuffi]

Bill, can you point me to a link that shows the process used to create that image of the moon?

I am very curious to know what the original ten images looked like, and what the advantage of having them and stacking them was over a single frame.

Thanks!

[Bill Boehme]

Bill, can you point me to a link that shows the process used to create that image of the moon?

I am very curious to know what the original ten images looked like, and what the advantage of having them and stacking them was over a single frame.

Thanks!

I don't know of a link describing the process, but I think that there is probably some information available on the Cloudy Nights (http://www.cloudynights.com) astronomy web site.

The original ten images were shot in RAW mode at about four second intervals and look very much like the final version except for having a bit more noise and also not being as sharp. Basically, in Photoshop CS3 Extended, when images are "stacked", the software automatically aligns the individual images. Once the image pixels of all of the layers have been aligned to match up, a composite image is then created in which the stacked pixel values at each point is processed using a user selected statistical analysis algorithm. These are just the basic run-of-the-mill things like mean value, median value, variance, standard deviation, skewness, etc. The only one that is relevant to this purpose is mean value, which is simply the average of all of the values at a given point. This accomplishes two things -- it greatly reduces those types of noise that are not time invariant and because of that, it also helps to sharpen edges. One of the greatest benefits of stacking is that it is useful in canceling out things that are external to the camera that can degrade image quality such as atmospheric refraction.

This really was not the originally intended purpose of the stack mode in Photoshop. It was originally intended to support engineering and scientific statistical analysis of image data. As a result, it is not the best tool for serious astrophotography. The dedicated programs perform much more sophisticated fast Fourier transform analysis of the stacked data to produce incredibly sharp detail, but at the expense of needing hundreds of images in the stack to yield high quality image results.