Shooting the moon.

I’m very interested to see how you would process this, since I’m always having a hard time processing moon shots. I think I did a decent job here, but I’m sure there are still ways to do it better.

It’s especially hard since there’s not a lot of resolution here, this was shot with a 300mm at f/8 and 2x TC on a crop sensor, so some quality loss was to be expected.

2020-04-26_DSC09424.ARW.pp3 (11.7 KB) 2020-04-26_DSC09424.ARW (23.4 MB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

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2020-04-26_DSC09424.jpg.out.pp3 (12.5 KB)

My take using a quick processing in ART:


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The moon is quite a complicated subject to photograph, although initially it does not seem so :slight_smile:
If you don’t mind you should consider the following:

  • moon moves quite fast in the sky, you should strive for a quicker shutter speed especially as you go up with the focal length. Some recommend to use the ‘sunny day rule’ (moon is actually litten by the sun anyway :D)
  • there is no need for f8 from depth of field consideration, you can go to whatever aperture your lens has it’s best results. Check any depth of field calculator and you will see that the DOF is huge at that focus distance anyway
  • many old teleconverters are just not up to the sensors we have today in regards to resolution. You should try to make a photo with the TC and one without, digitally crop the one without and compare. You might get more resolution from the one without TC.
  • and if you have time during this pandemic stay-at-home period you can try to stack. The procedure here is easy to follow and gives quite good results: Lunar photography: Shooting for the moon
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Amazing @zerosapte I did the same shot yesterday night with my Canon 700D + Tamron 150-600mm Di VC USD at 600 mm

Just for the fun look at it and search for diffs :slight_smile:


and the CANON RAW 2020_04_26_IMG_2631.cr2 (18.0 MB) 2020_04_26_IMG_2631.cr2.xmp (9.6 KB)

Have some good Astro nights …


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darktable 3.0.2
2020-04-26_DSC09424.ARW.xmp (9,4 Ko)

20200417_Balkon_1395.DNG.pp3 (11.9 KB)

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Good advise.

Dude. I know you’re asking for editorial on this one image, but… Daniel did not cover stacking hard enough! It’s important.

So NOW is the time to talk about image stacking. Taking one shot of the moon? That’s what a photographer does. Taking 10 or 100 or 1000 shots with an intervalometer firing as fast as the shutter will trip, before the moon moves off the lens’ sweet spot, then stacking them so that 50% of the shots get used for resolution and the other for bias, even without flatfield and darkfield and bias shots, makes you now a astrophotographer!

That’s even what my icon is, just saying. The near-full moon of the 6th.

300mm on a crop body so technically 480mm, but the moon is pretty distant this time of year so she’s not very big 1:1 @ 20MP, still…

the worst single-frame, on a hazy wispy cloudy night where visibility changes every 10 seconds: lunar-almost-full-single-frame-w-polarizer

100 image stack, with 61 images selected for median blending: lunar-almost-full-61-image-stack

Grossly over-contrasted to show the resolution increase.

Emil Kraaikamp’s AutoStakkert is definitely a good place to start for planetary and lunar image stacking without being technical, although I love ImageJ. And for more general purpose astrophotography, grab yourself DeepSkyStacker. (BTW all of these are Windows apps but run fine in linux with any recent version of wine)

Hi @Bob_Wyglz, welcome. Neither DeepSkyStacker nor AutoStakkert are free or open source software, which is what we promote here on this forum.

If you’d like to try some free astro software, check out Siril.

hey there. DeepSkyStacker is in fact freeware, free, free as in beer… not open source, no, but it is an important distinction to what you are claiming.

AutoStakkert is essentially donationware, it never begs, it never forces you to register, or get a free_user_key after a trial period. and you get one splash screen for a company you’ve never heard of and will likely never buy from. :slight_smile:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge proponent of OSS/GPL and have the GNU hurd t-shirts to prove it, and am a card-carrying member of EFF since '92 (not the beginning but longer than most!)

… but the average photographer just teaching themselves stuff like this?

They still argue over distros, like there’s a difference. Those of us who use linux 18-hours a day, 10 at work and another 8 doing our own stuff, know there’s very little difference between distros, nevermind the really dumb stuff like preferring Mint → Ubuntu → Debian (and talking like their different besides some system-specific utilities!)

If you gave most of these level people a blank console without X running, without GNOME’s NetworkManager, and told them to fire up dhclient and wpa_supplicant and manually connect to an AP by SSID, they’d stare at you like you were talking a foreign language. It’s not that they’re dumb, it’s that it’s outside their skill set. Sure, they could learn. But it’s not part of their daily life.

Which is why I don’t suggest Siril nor even hugin out-of-the-gate. And Siril isn’t very good for planetary or lunar anyway! Same for DSS, which is why I specifically suggested AS first.

Myself I much prefer panotools/hugin still, total control… even with RT I still prefer fulla & tca_correct to lensfun, by a factor of that 4th polynomial actually, but you don’t suggest it to people who are in the playraw group do you, unless you know their skill level.

I stand by my easy-to-use FREE suggestions!

Yes and there is a titanic difference between free ware and Free Software. Judging by the rest of your post, you know the difference between the two, so I won’t explain it.

And again, not Free Software. Not Open Source Software.

Excellent.

That’s why this forum exists, so we can help people learn.

The rest of your points about X, consoles, and GNOME do not apply, as almost all of the software here is multi-platform.

You’re free to not suggest whatever you’d like.

We’re all here to lean and better FOSS. If we never suggest something out of someone’s skill level, then how do we grow? We don’t.

You’re free to stand by whatever you’d like. This forum is for the support and promotion of Free and Open Source software. There is literally every other forum or chat room on the internet to talk about non-FOSS software. Recommending non-FOSS software here is counter productive.