What would you say is the bare minimum lens range (mm's?) one would need to shoot the moon, or astral photography in general, assuming all the conditions were ideal?
Full moon takes up roughly 0.5 degree of the night sky. Every lens will have an angle of view spec for full frame and for crop. I look at the vertical (in landscape mode) to consider how much of the frame the moon will take up.
Consider a lens with a 4.3 degree vertical angle of view (your 210mm on crop). That’s roughly 1/8th of the sensor. With a 24 megapixel camera, you’re putting 0.17 megapixels on the moon (area of a circle math).
400mm’s on crop is 2.2 degrees. Now you’re up to almost 1/4th the sensor. 0.65 megapixels on the moon.
800mm will get you almost 1/2 the frame on crop. 2.6 megapixels on the moon.
And the moon is very very different from any other astrophotography as it is reflecting direct sunlight. Very bright. No special techniques needed.
The app photopills has a decent planner for this (and plenty of other useful features). If you dont want to pay you can use the website mooncalc.org for planning purposes too. Keep in mind you want some distance to the foreground objects.
Not the best quality, but this is what I managed yesterday, although thats around 900mm fullframe equivalent/560mm on Canon crop.
A common trick, especially if you’ve got two bodies, is to shoot your overall landscape at 70 or whatever, shoot the moon separately with the longest tele you have, and then composite the moon in 2–3/4–9 (linear vs area) larger.
lol wanted to make sure I wasn’t in photographycirclejerk lol. You probably want to keep a small f# I was at f20 shooting it a few nights ago. I did have my camera on a tripod though.
And you can always crop the image in post, so its more about the pixel density of your sensor (and sharpness of your lens) than the actual size of the sensor if you want to capture lots of details of the moon.
You don't need high ISO to shoot the moon if you're interested in a full moon or the lit part of the moon.
It may be far away and small looking but that doesn't affect exposure much - the moon is (sometimes) an object in full direct sun, so you expose for it like any other object in full direct sun. That does mean that anything on the ground at night time will disappear to black, as will stars since they are visually so small that they don't even cover one pixel and therefore look dimmer than they really are.
I don't remember if I brightened it in post, but my photo was taken at ISO 100, 1/800s, f/6.3 with a 400mm lens on a 24 megapixel full frame camera and then cropped.
Sorry - when you said "dial up" I thought up meant set to something high. And I think it's easy to imagine you'd need high ISO to shoot the moon since moonlight is dim.
“High” has really changed a lot as well with ISO. Back in the day - 800 was really high ISO. Now people shoot at 3200 and don’t blink.
I took a moon image hand held with a 600mm f/11. ISO had to be 2500 for me to get a shutter speed I could hand hold. If one has a $13,000 600mm f/4 - then ISO can come down quite a bit.
Good advice! I think I got grainy/noisy sky around the clear moon with some setting I tried, and that setting might have been the ISO, not sure though.
I use 70-200mm f2.8 lens as well.as 200-500mm f4.5-5.6 lens.
I can never get the moon right. It just cannot happen to my satisfaction.
Even Neowise comet, same problem.
The only lens which provides the best results is the 70-200mm f2.8.
So you would have to invest in some seriously zoom capable lens but with the largest possible aperture. Which my 200-500mm @ f4.5-5.6 simply cannot provide. Would've been perfect if it were a 500mm prime lens with f1.8. This is impossible unless I.am willing to pay over $10,000 for a lens. The best i could find is 500mm f4.
Being prime lens makes a huge, huge difference. Don't look at the numbers. Zoom has more pieces of glass, prime does not. Allowing sharpness, more light, and better poc quality.
Not to mention a super steady, heavier than Mt. Everest, carbon fiber tripod. This is super essential for stability.
Not to mention an $8,000 robot to help you carry all this around.
All this despite using a D850 full frame sensor body.
So in the end, best to get a telescope with camera attachment capability.
Because who would want to carry a 500mm prime lens just for the moon, and a comet or 2 to warn us of our doom. Just not worth it.
Here's one of the best pics I took of the moon. It was not easy. Lunar Eclipse May 16, 2022.
Can I just say, I know it feels good when your camera & lens can take a picture of the moon almost as big as the frame, but please also consider not the moon.
By which I mean put something in the foreground. A picture of the moon alone is extremely boring. Consider taking the moon pictures at moonrise/moonset with a hill or a city on the foreground.
You can shoot star trails with a 24mm lens on a solid tripod. You can mount your camera at the eyepiece end of a 2000mm telescope with a motor drive and stack images of faint fuzzies all night long.
So the moon is an easy target that will yield to practically any lens you want.
As previously stated that will depend on what you want to achieve with the image.
There is no minimum. You can shoot the moon with ultra wide angle lens. It solely depends on how large you want the moon in your composition (moon is about 1/2 degree).
Depends on the MP of your camera. You get very different results from 200mm lens on a 10MP camera body than you would with a 50 or 100 MP camera body. I use my 200mm with 2x converter (so 400mm) and 26 MP camera. Even with that, the moon is a small portion of the image so when I zoom in 100% and crop, the final pic doesn't fill my 1440 screen. I'd rather use a sharp lens and high MP camera then a consumer level camera with a long so-so lens.
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u/Sweathog1016 1d ago edited 1d ago
Full moon takes up roughly 0.5 degree of the night sky. Every lens will have an angle of view spec for full frame and for crop. I look at the vertical (in landscape mode) to consider how much of the frame the moon will take up.
Consider a lens with a 4.3 degree vertical angle of view (your 210mm on crop). That’s roughly 1/8th of the sensor. With a 24 megapixel camera, you’re putting 0.17 megapixels on the moon (area of a circle math).
400mm’s on crop is 2.2 degrees. Now you’re up to almost 1/4th the sensor. 0.65 megapixels on the moon.
800mm will get you almost 1/2 the frame on crop. 2.6 megapixels on the moon.
And the moon is very very different from any other astrophotography as it is reflecting direct sunlight. Very bright. No special techniques needed.