Day 326 - Moon Shot

best yet but not great

With clear skies and an almost full (waxing gibbous, don'tcha know?) moon this evening, I decided to check out my astronomy photography skills...turns out I haven't really got any!

I figured I should probably use a long exposure time, my longest zoom lens, and a tripod...so  I dug out my little portable tripod, and put the camera into Shutter Priority for the first time.

The little tripod is possibly not built to take the weight of a full size DSLR complete with long lens...I couldn't get it pointing directly at the moon, and the legs kept collapsing...and when I did finally get it pointed at the moon, it was really shaky. 

Consequently, with 8 seconds of exposure time, all I got was a massive, full-bright blurry blob on a colourless background...so I gradually shortened the exposure, and found that it wasn't until I got to about 1/4000th of a second that it stopped being over bright.

Given that it was really chilly out, we still had to walk Wonderboy (latest nickname for Robin, The Boy Wonder), have dinner, blog, give the animals some attention, feed them all, investigate and fix an annoying problem with the PC I've been working on, and shower, I didn't want to spend too long, so left it at that.

Of the dozen or so photo's I took, this is the best, and it's not great!   I've cropped it out of a larger photo, obviously, but it's not crisp and focussed, as you can see.

Now I think about it, I probably should have had it on manual mode...with a shorter f-stop, and a lower ISO, maybe a longer exposure would then result in a clearer, more balanced image...if I could rig up a stable tripod arrangement...

And actually, I need a remote shutter release.  I think we have one, so I'll need to dig that out and see if I can get it working too.

Full moon for the next couple of nights, so if it stays clear, I'll have another go.

This time, I'll even research the best settings on the net!

B-)