Moon

2016-05-19 20:15:35

I recently treated myself to a new camera, a Sony A6000 compact mirrorless camera, and a couple of lenses for it. One was the kit lens, a 16-50mm zoom, and the other was a 55-210mm zoom. I tried the long lens out on the moon one evening last month, not expecting much. This was a challenge, because the camera is long on complicated controls and short on instructions. Eventually, I figured out how to put it on manual and control exposure and aperture. The moon does not require a long exposure, which is good, because the picture was taken with the camera awkwardly braced against the utility box in my front yard. (I have a tripod, but the bit that attaches to the camera was missing. It turned up the other day fortunately.) Anyway, I was surprised at how much detail shows--craters and mountains. I didn't do anything to the image but crop it. (The original is 6000 by 4000 pixels; pretty big. My camera has an 24mm APS-C sensor.)

The original goal was to image the moon and Jupiter in the same frame; the moon was quite close to Jupiter that evening. This turns out to not work well--the moon is much brighter than Jupiter. Jupiter was barely visible in this shot; a longer exposure would show Jupiter but the moon would be badly overexposed. I'm not certain of what settings I used for this shot. I think 210mm, f9, ISO100, and 1/100 sec exposure.