Ok, my first Moon Shot!

[akeefer]

Hey everyone,

Go easy on me as this is my first attempt to do the moon! I'm using my 40D, Bogen Tripod, Giottos ball head, and Sigma 120-400mm lens.

This shot was taking with I believe 1/100, f/5.6, ISO 200. It seemed kind of shaky with the wind, but I'm not sure what to do. It's okay but not great. I really can't find a good tutorial on how to do this. Is there some thread out there that does? I've tried searching with no avail. Anyway, here it is:
http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/8755/moon2w.jpg

Thanks,
Aaron

[akeefer]

OH yeah, that's a 100% crop. Sorry forgot to mention that.

[grfics]

You should try a faster shutter in the wind. It looks to me like it's focused well but vibrated.

[Bill Boehme]

Hey everyone,

Go easy on me as this is my first attempt to do the moon! I'm using my 40D, Bogen Tripod, Giottos ball head, and Sigma 120-400mm lens.

This shot was taking with I believe 1/100, f/5.6, ISO 200. It seemed kind of shaky with the wind, but I'm not sure what to do. It's okay but not great. I really can't find a good tutorial on how to do this. Is there some thread out there that does? I've tried searching with no avail. Anyway, here it is:


Thanks,
Aaron

Aaron, I would say that is quite good, especially considering that it is your first moon image attempt. Having a rock solid tripod and head are very important, but sometimes when the wind is blowing, even a big solid tripod will shake a bit. One good feature on a tripod, in addition to being very sturdy, is to have a center anchor point that can be either connected to a ground anchor or a heavy weight object. I use a bungee cord to an aircraft tie-down anchor. Bags of lead shot or sandbags draped over the tripod legs also help to dampen vibration. The shutter should be triggered with a remote shutter release cable. Here is a link to a moon imaging tutorial that I wrote not too long ago. It is mostly about post processing, but also has a bit of information about capturing the image.Moon Imaging Tutorial (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=675341)
Stacking moon images is a technique for really improving the quality compared to a single image. Basically, stacking involves aligning the images and then applying some sort of processing such as calculating the mean value of each image pixel to help clean up noise. Here is a link to a thread in which I stacked nine moon images made with my 400 mm lens and two teleconverters.Stacked Images of Moon (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=676833)
Conditions were essentially perfect when I made these images. During the summer, it is not easy to find such good seeing conditions.

[Bill Boehme]

Also, I forgot to mention to lock up the mirror. It will make a huge difference. If you have an IS lens, turn it off since it is not needed and can cause some blur on longer exposures even if using mode 2 -- in engineering terms, the IS does what is know as a "dead beat limit cycle" which means that it "hunts" while motionless because it does not have a perfectly nulled zero-motion deadband. For most photography, this is a good thing, but for astrophotography when you are trying to use the lens to its maximum capability, it is slightly detrimental.