I have decided that I really like my 7D camera and 400/5.6 lens. The conditions for shooting the moon were not the best -- low elevation and slight haze, but I was interested in trying out Live View combined with Silent Shooting mode 1 to eliminate vibration from the first shutter curtain to see if it offered any gain beyond MLU. The answer is definitely yes! I also used 1.4X and 2X TCs stacked together on the 400 mm lens to give me 1120 mm @ f/16. In my haste, I underexposed the images by almost two stops, so post processing really brought the noise level up. Focusing is very critical -- while the LV AF function is close, it is not close enough. Manual focusing is extremely touchy, but after multiple tries using 10X in LV, I finally got it. A tracking head would be nice since it only takes a half minute before the moon is out of the FOV.
Here is a small 100% crop from one shot. No NR other than a small amount of chrominance in ACR was used, but I did add a bit of sharpening, hopefully not too much. The underexposure was a killer. This was done at f/16, ISO 100, and 1/50 second. I did not bother with straightening the moon (i.e., North at the top).
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