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Moontastic
by Bruce Ure at 13:13 17/11/05 (Blogs::Bruce)
After Simon indicated the potential of my camera for astronomical photography, I decided to take some moon shots last night. It was damn freezing and an extremely clear night.
First thing I discovered was that it's not all that easy to align a heavy camera and 800mm f2.8 lens combination on top of a tripod with a quick-release friction ball head, and point it at certain angles at the sky, without the head overloading and dropping it down again. It likes to be either completely vertical or completely horizontal, give or take 15 degrees or so, but nowhere inbetween. So all the shots were tripod-steadied rather than tripod mounted. I have several other tripod heads, the one I was using was the least suitable (but very much the most convenient at the time) so I should be able to remedy this.

The second thing is that for some reason I wasn't able to use mirror lock-up (which is where you lock the mirror up prior to firing the shutter, so that the vibration caused by the relatively heavy mirror is eliminated) because the camera had this option greyed out. This will be down to either the particular shooting mode, or some factor of the lens, or some setting or other, and can probably be overcome.

Anyway both of the above are why the following picture is annoyingly blurry, although it is still quite a good try I think. I'll have another go soon, and try and fix those irritations.

The original TIF was 21,160,688 bytes (compressed) and measured 3216 x 2136, I cropped it down to 1441 x 1345, and applied some Smart Sharpen. It is now a mere 2,419,632 bytes as a TIF and 2,561,246 bytes as a PNG:

Moon as a TIF

Moon as a PNG

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Moontastic Bruce Ure - 13:13 17/11/05
Re: Moontastic Simon - 13:51 17/11/05
annoyingly blurry

You wot!? That's fantastic for a tripod-steadied/handheld shot!

Tip for avoiding mirror-shake - hold a piece of cardboard in front of the lens, open the shutter, remove the cardboard. Obviously a bit tricky for the 1/60th exposure but works fine for lengthy time exposures of star fields.

Try about 15s pointed at the Pleiades (mind you, you'll have to wait a forthnight until the Moon's near new.)

Excellent work mate - what were your settings? A shorter exposure at the same ISO will give you a more contrast to work with, but the right limb detail is terrific.

3216 x 2136

... which means the raw images, uncompressed, must be about 19.7MB?

Cheers
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simon

- Deleted User Account - 22:33 09/08/06
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Lunstice Simon - 09:07 10/08/06
Keep an eye out next Thursday for moonrise around midnight - it's the maximum northernmost moonrise (as opposed to southernmost, which we saw at Stonehenge in July).

The moon rises even further to the north than the Sun does on the summer solstice, and is above the horizon for 18 hours 15 minutes.
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simon