Not a great image, but it was first time using the Tokina 2035 3.5-4.5 lens with my Sony A6300. I couldn’t stay out long because I could not make setting changes with my lousy gloves. I was able to capture the Moon and Venus. Also the faint dot just below the Moon is Saturn. I knew I was going for the Moon and Venus. But never knew Saturn until I saw it on Stellarium.
Any help with how to fix the overexposed Moon is appreciated. If you have other ideas, those are welcome as well.
You didn’t specify this as a play raw, but I did have a play, thanks to you licensing the image.
Capturing Mercury in the “jaws” of the tree was a nice touch!
Unfortunately, the moon is so thoroughly blown that there is little that can be done to recover much detail - experimenting with highlight recovery methods after reducing the exposure on the brightest tones gave a semblance of a non-full moon, but that’s the best that I could manage.
Mercury is also blown, but the shape (from aperture blades? Or did you use a filter?) and small diameter make him more pleasing to the eye. Even Saturn is blown upon pixel-peeping.
It is very hard to get a successful conjunction of the moon with other night-sky objects, because the moon is just so many [sometimes thousands - 10 stops] times brighter. In this case, however, the total exposure time is just much too long for all the subject astro-objects, so I fear this is a chalk-up to experience. Others with more astro experience will be able to be more helpful, I hope.
Sadly the moon is totally blown and I can’t imagine anyone can recover it. The moon is very bright and can be seen in daylight so a good exposure for the moon is similar to a daylight exposure on earth. You used one second and that would never work. Hopefully you get a nice clear night again and can take a new shot. Maybe 400 ISO, 1/400th of a second and about f11 would be a reasonable starting point.
