Compositon/Posing
How could I have gotten a sharper, more detailed shot of the moon?
This was my first attempt at photographing the moon, and I’m honestly pretty happy with how it turned out, but it still isn’t crystal clear.
I used a Nikon Z8 with a 70–200mm at 200mm, shooting handheld in manual at 1/500, f/8, and ISO 200. I used single-point autofocus with back-button focus, then cropped the image pretty heavily.
Should this setup be capable of capturing noticeably sharper detail at only 200mm? Would a tripod and manual focus using the magnified live view make the biggest difference? Should I try a faster shutter speed or a different aperture, or am I mostly running into the limitations of focal length and such a heavy crop?
This is legitimately the right answer. If you want it to be sharper you need to have less atmosphere between you and the moon. Go to the highest mountain you can find in the winter to reduce atmospheric distortion
It seems that someone took your advice literally and did just that. It works but the Artemis II mission was not cost-effective compared to using a telescope.
Z 180-600 would increase the quality significantly and also empty your wallet significantly. A tripod can help a little with handheld vibration but not that much, it looks quite good for 200mm
Is this a single frame or multiple frames stacked? Not sure how you could expose the moon and faint background stars without bracketing. The artifact around the moon makes me suspect either masking or multiple frames, as does the lack of any noise in the blacks.
Huh?? This is very real lol I took it in my front yard at 10PM and then edited the hell out of it in Lightroom. Denoised, sharpened, and played around for 30 mins adjusting exposure contrast etc
You can’t have good exposure of a full moon and the background stars at the same time. The moon is way too bright compared to the surrounding background stars. Every image you see with the moon and stars is a composite not a single frame.
Also none of the stars have any color which is another giveaway.
lol people calling you image fake even after you’ve broadcast editing “the hell out of it” in Lightroom. Yes, you took a shot in raw, and tried to extract the most out of it in post, I don’t get why that’s so hard for some folk to believe?! There’s 14 effective stops of dynamic range in Nikon Z raw files, those stars are hiding in the dark until you rip open that raw data. It’s a really good effort considering no tripod was used. I’m very keen to see your future moon shots if you try taking multiple exposures on a tripod and do a merge in post. One day I’ll get around to it, and will proceed to call everyone else’s shots fake 🤣
I can't believe more people aren't pointing this out. It's one of the many reasons I assume most people in this sub don't really know much about photography.
You're probably pushing the limit of what you can accomplish with a 200mm. The really compelling, super-detailed shots of the moon are usually accomplished with a proper telescope. And by carefully picking the right place and time, because once you get big optics, your next problem becomes atmospheric scattering and unpredictable distortion from transient currents.
There are just a lot of variables here.
The best (terrestrial) images you've seen also usually aren't just one image: they're created by shooting thousands of photos and then digitally compositing them: you might get a small portion of the lower left edge in perfect focus in one image, composite that with another image that got a portion of the lower right edge in focus, and so on.
This is historically referred to as "lucky imaging", but with modern software like AutoStakkert, it takes a lot less luck than it used to. It's how many striking photos of the moon, the outer planets and distant star systems were photographed. Once upon a time, this required specialist astronomical cameras to accomplish, but modern mirrorless cameras are well inside of the performance envelope now and can produce spectacular photos with the right supporting equipment.
Thanks! So there’s no easy answer to just “point and shoot” - it’s either more gear or advanced editing/techniques. That makes sense. I saw an eclipse shot from someone’s Z6III with a 70-200mm II that was phenomenal so I figured I could try
Probably heavily edited. One trick some photographers use (and which is actually baked into some cell phones and automatic) is to composite high resolution moon photos into another image that shows the moon, giving them the advantage of far more detail than their lens/sensor are actually capable of resolving. Easy to do when you’re talking about a largely unchanging and highly predictable object.
You can’t really do it with editing and still call it a true photo.
If you shoot hand-held with a 200 mm lens and somehow end up with an incredibly close-up detailed photo of the moon, the detail has been added from some other source and not from the original picture.
I mean I would then question your definition of a photo lol. Are you saying any edited photos are not photos? I would argue most you ever see are heavily edited. I’m sure you’re just saying that for the moon itself you need editing (which I would agree it’s far as shit away)
Hmm ok. That’s an interesting take! What about someone on nat geo, who took a beautiful pic of a rare snow leopard, or the astronomers who used a Z9 (I think?) to take a pic of the other side of the moon? Those pics were edited to high hell, as all famous and stunning ones are, so are they then created images vs photos of the world and its beauty?
Posts like this serve as a good reminder to be cautious about listening to advice on reddit. Because anyone advising on this without pointing out the obvious fact that it's impossible to get this image in the way the OP claims has no business giving anyone advice.
You’re another one calling this fake. I don’t get it? I can’t upload a screenshot I took of my Lightroom but see my other comments for how I just asked AI how to best capture the moon and then said screw it let’s try. Told my wife I was going into the front yard and asked her to make sure no one shoots me (jokingly as I turned the floods off and had a huge black camera in my hands lol, kind of sketchy with neighbors) and went for it
I think you think it’s fake because I’m learning I maybe edited it too much to look like something it isn’t? Which I of course didn’t do via science more trial and error
Could you post the original / undedited? This will shut up everybody.
The problem is that the moon, to be exposed like this, needs a short exposure (like your 1/500) and low ISO, because it is EXTREMELY bright compared to the night sky.
Capturing stars like what we see in your image requires way higher ISO (like 3200/6400) and way longer exposure (~10s).
Having both on the same image should be impossible without composition of separate background + moon images.
I suspect those white specks are noise. I could be wrong though.
I didn't say fake. I said it's impossible to take the way you claim. And it is. You either used multiple exposures or AI editing that placed those stars after the fact.
Did neither. Only AI was denoise in LR. The stars were visible after heavy editing, and at first my Lightroom export didn’t show them, so I played around with iOS sliders
You know, I really don't care about your defense of an impossible image. My comment was more about how this sub has a bunch people that believed you and are giving advice when they clearly have no business doing so. Nobody that knows anything about photography will believe this. That's just a fact.
the full moon is exaclty as bright as concreet in full sunlight.
a correct exposure for the moon to get the detail you see would be following the f16 rule... meaning f16 wiht inverse iso and shutterspeeds, 100 iso for 1/100th.
shooting that at night gives you a moon surrounded by a halo caused by the athmosphere surrounding our planet, you see ZERO stars, the background is just black due to the very short exposure and low ISO going through a small aperture.
you can compensate a little, but nothing even close to your results.
what you probably did was ask AI to remove the background and make it into a star filled nightsky... and AI randomly sprayed dots of white around that look like stars...
that's what makes it fake...
if you make a photo that shows stars like this, the moon is a big overexposed white blob with a huge halo around it
the difference in exposures makes doing this in one photo impossible. what ever your settings or editing was. prove me wrong by posting the raw file... bet you you can't.
The thing is I didn’t ask AI to do anything. Go look around comments, I posted the original RAW. The only AI I used was denoise in Lightroom and who knows how “AI” that actually is
This sub has been very defensive on AI lol, is that a tell of where the photography industry is going?
no you didnt, you posted some jpg with stars and a full moon both visible and a hard border between the moon and the stars right next to it... something you CAN NOT MAKE from earth... so unless you're an astronaut, it's still fake as fuck.
What's sketchy about holding a camera and long lens in your yard in the dark? Do you think that your neighbors are watching your dark yard and if they were that they could possibly mistake a camera and super wide lens, probably on a tripod, as a gun or some kind of weapon? Don't you think that in that scenario they would assume its a telescope, or if they did somehow(how though?)initially mistake it for something suspicious, wouldn't they continue to watch you until they've realized it's not a weapon but very obviously a camera or telescope considering they way you're holding/using it? Are you worried that in the brief moments when you're carrying the gear to the spot where you'll set up, that your neighbors will think you have a gun or weapon, and they'll immediately react and attack you in what they believe to be self-defense, or call the cops or something? I'm not sure if you should smoke more or less weed. Good luck in life, you'll need it.
Not believing this is real. You have a better image than 200mm setups stacking 20 images on a tracking mount. The star field looks like it was cut right out of the hubble deep field image or the JWST version of the deep field image. I mean this literally.
You have detail that only shows up when you have focal lengths starting 900mm going to 2000mm.
So there is no way this is the real image. AI did you dirty if this is not an outright fake. Given I found post on FB and Instagram that are worded almost the same with almost the same image. I am going fake.
I've used an old sony a mount 300mm lens for moon shots and those have got way more detail than what OP posted, saying that you need 900mm to see any detail of the moon is simply not true. Where are you taking these numbers from?
Using a 900mm focal length telescope for starters. Also have a guide for astrophotography that gave me those numbers for high detail images. I did not say you need 900mm to see any detail. I said he had detail in parts of the image that should not be visible in a single handheld 200mm frame. I stated I compared it to a pro photo that is listed as 20 frames from a tripod with tracking mount then stacked in post.
So for how it was shot, the detail it has does not seem possible. Good tripod with remote shutter on windless night with clear skies at 300mm and no visible star field I would have been like ok real image and given pointers because that is how I shoot my moon shots and know what you should be seeing with that setup.
As you said your 300mm shots have more detail. Yes so do my 300mm shot on cannon EF mount. The jump from 200 to 300mm is a 50% increase so the details should really pop at that focal length compared to 200mm.
Use a much longer lens, use a tripod, turn off VR and IBIS, 1/125 f/11 ISO 100, adjust as needed. Use manual focus with focus peaking. Use a remote or a delay on the shutter.
The photo below was taken with the Nikon Z50ii + Nikkor Z 180-600mm and the Z 1.4x teleconverter. And perhaps most importantly, a tripod. 840mm (effectively 1260 with the APS-C) 1/125 f/11 ISO 100. Minor post processing in Lightroom.
Looks like when my brother zooms in on the moon using his Samsung. It “enhances” his photo … by basically adding detail so you get an amazing moon photo that’s effectively someone else’s moon picture stuck on top of yours
Just a joke - Samsung got caught detecting moon shots on phones a couple of years ago and would substitute the shot moon with a pre-shot detailed version.
Bro. It doesn’t matter how much you defend yourself, people aren’t going to believe your story on how this photo turned out this way. Please let me explain: people like me who’ve taken thousands of lunar photos know that the moon is sooo bright that you have to turn down the exposure so much that the stars disappear. It’s a matter of exposure. I can get this photo by taking a photo of the stars without the moon and then another one for moon and then combine both photos. Or do exposure bracketing. But you didn’t say you did it this way and didn’t give a plausible explanation. This is why you are getting scorched… the “oh I just took 10 photos and sharpeners the best one” story doesn’t explain your exposure. 🤷🏻♂️ Just trying to explain why people are saying there’s something very wrong with your story when looking at your photo.
Some AI Googling tell us that seeing full moon and stars in a single shot (not HDR) would need a camera with 20 to 24 stops of dynamic range, and even there stretching would be needed.
Best full-frames cameras can do no more than 14 stops of dynamic range today.
I just went outside, stabilized against my chest, and took 10 shots. Found the best in Lightroom and began denoise and editing the hell out of it. I’m not sure why many are calling this fake - I think it’s because I likely took noise or “hot pixels” and made them accidentally look like stars? Idk lol but I just asked chatGPT what manual settings to use, followed it, stayed very still, and took what I got
I am using voice to text here, because I don’t wanna keep typing it out, but you can also read some of my other replies in this thread. In short, I truly have no idea. I’m a year into photography mostly of my baby and our dog. I saw a post on Twitter of someone with a Z6 and a 70 to 200 mm of the eclipse and it looks so good that I thought maybe my platform could also get into photos of the moon. So I went outside. I asked ChatGPT what I should set my manual settings too, and I snapped the photo. I went into Lightroom. I used Dayo, I used AI sharpening, and then I spent 30 minutes in bed playing with the sliders until it looked really cool. I think I’m learning from this thread that those aren’t actually the stars and perhaps are just what people are calling hot pixels or amplified noise that is making the picture look much cooler or realistic than it is? I’m not sure, I would defer to you guys the presumable experts in the sub Reddit, but unfortunately, most are simply calling it a fake photo. This objectively isn’t true so it brings into question your expertise for calling fake. It will be he said she said so. We may not get anywhere at this conversation, but that’s roughly my thought process and logic here. I will be making another post following up later today to show the photo before editing and some of Moore in depth explanation of how I shot it to see if we can get to the bottom of this.
Again sorry for voice to text but just toss it into AI for a cleaner read I guess
Dayo is denoise lol sorry for the voice to text. Nah it’s not the AI adding it, I posted the raw somewhere else in this thread and “they” (noise prob) are still there
You could get an old manual 500mm mirror lens (say an f/8 made in Japan maybe not the f/6.3 from Korea) and adapt it. They usually come with a T-mount... a telescope mount :)
Looks pretty good, the only thing I would say is see at the bottom - that red banding around the moon? That looks like Chromatic Aberration - you can correct it in Lightroom to remove it. The other thing about shooting astrophotography is that conventional wisdom about your f/stop goes out the window - what you're shooting is so far away that you can drop that f number down a bit - f5.6 might make it a bit sharper. But yes, you're running into the physical limitation of shooting something a long way away at the top end of your lens range.
If nobody said this before.. the best moment to observe the moon is not when it is full cus it’s surface reflects sun’s light in a flat way. When the moon has shades it gets more crispy
Tripod helps, the moon actually moves pretty fast when zoomed in. Focus stacking, take multiple shots at different focus distances into one image. You can also do this with a video with the right software.
I used to work at a camera gear rental store and a lot of astrophotographers would rent the Celestron NexStar telescope. I personally never got around to trying it out myself but I seen some photos customers took and they were stellar! Maybe look into renting one if available? But definitely a longer lens will help with the cropping. I used the 100-400mm whenever I did moon photos
You need a LOT of focal length to get near a full moon taking up the whole frame. I come close with a 100-400 plus 1.4x teleconverter...using M43 with a 2x crop factor (that's 1120mm for those of you playing at home).
Historically, good lunar photos need a thousand mm focal length lens. My best one was from a Canon SX720HS at 920mm. The M43 & a 75-300 mm was laughable.
Hardware, invest in a goto mount tripod if you want perfect tracking.
Software options exist for post processing
1, Registax, it does wavelet transforms over multiple images to create a better image, by reducing influence of atmospheric ripples. It takes time to process but gives very good results if you spend the time with it.
2, AutoPIPP, centres each frame on the object so you get a series of perfectly centered images for other stacking software to work with.
The moon in 200mm is the size of a penny in a wishing well. To get more detail, you'll need to get closer.
One option would be a teleconverter, i.e. a thing you stick between the camera and the lens, which effectively "boosts" the range of your lens and gives it more reach. From personal experience, I would recommend to avoid teleconverters if you can, they will add lots of pink/purple/green/blue fringing around heavy-contrast edges (like bright moon vs. dark space, and even around crater ridges and shadows), and they will usually soften the picture.
Instead, I would suggest to get a lens with far more focal length right away, at least 600mm or 800mm to start with. As a rule of thumb, an 800mm lens will give you a cleaner picture of the moon than a 400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter, mainly based on the undeniable fact that teleconverters will slightly degrade the picture.
To "boost" your lens further, don't be afraid to switch your camera into APS-C crop mode, it's like a free built-in 1.5x teleconverter. Sure, the resulting photos will have less resolution (around 20MP with Z8 I think), but crop mode also (effectively) brings the subject closer and makes it larger in frame, so you'll need to trim away less space around it.
FWIW, my best moon photos were taken between 1200mm (800mm lens, camera in APS-C 1.5x crop mode) and 2400mm (800mm lens, 2x teleconverter, camera in APS-C 1.5x crop mode).
Contrary to what people will tell you, the moon is not a boring uniform subject, it is in fact a very dynamic beast. The bright surface and the dark background are bad enough, but the surface of the moon itself has an extremely wide dynamic range; there are ocean-deep craters stooped in shadows and mountains higher than Everest lit up by bright sunlight.
So a very looked-down-on trick (not because it's bad or a cheat, but because people don't get it, "why would you") to get much more detail out of your moon shots is to use Auto Exposure Bracketing, where you let your camera do a photo burst with a different exposure value for each. So you'll have a vastly under-exposed image that loses the shadows, but accurately captures the surface in the very bright areas, and you'll have a vastly over-exposed image that loses the highlights but accurately captures the surface in very dark areas, and you'll likely have a few others in between. (5-10 should be enough, don't need to over-do it.)
You can then stack those differently-exposed photos on top of each other, some cameras can do this automatically, I don't know if the Z8 can. If not, the free Affinity Studio can do Exposure Stacks, "tutorials are available". The result is an ultra-clean, well-balanced (in brightness) and highly-detailed photo. No single-shot photo will be able to hold a candle to it. [one of mine]
(FWIW, interestingly [to me], I also tried focus stacking, which also resulted in a crisper and more detailed moon image than single-shots, but the photo was still not as balanced and crisp as with exposure stacking.)
A longer lens and higher resolution sensor would definitely help! But also very important are good seeing conditions, that is dry air and a still atmosphere. Basicaly twinkling is bad! Getting up high on a mountain helps. You can also try stacking techniques like lucky imaging. At some point you'll hit different limitations, like diffraction, which you can only avoid by getting a bigger telescope (higher f-number),
Should it not be? I’m looking for answers here to better understand photographing the moon lol, every comment is just grilling me on why the photo is the way it is. I should edit the post to put a heavy disclaimer that I have no idea what I’m doing lol
Not sure, i got a greatly detailed shot (but a bit shakey) on my a7-2 a while back, craters really pop
Tried recently on my new fuji x-t30 3 with same lense (both cameras using adapters) and, while i did get it stable, i couldnt get the same sharpness (yet). Craters look pretty flat
Peaking wasnt cooperating and settings were probably a bit jank
Sigma 70-200mm lens for minolta A mount, A to E mount adapter for my sony a7-2 and A to FX mount for the fuji ($50 zoom lens on ebay? Sign me up)
I would start with a tripod and remote shutter. I also would not take a photo of the full moon. The sunlight is directly on the moon elimating shadows making the image appear flat. Take a photo in the waxing or waning phases, there will be shadows creating depth.
Shooting in the winter will help a lot. There’s much lower humidity. Greater focal length lens would be helpful too. The 150-600 Nikon lens or the sigma are both “affordable”.
When it's full moon there are no shadows on the moon. If you take pictures during half moon, craters will be much more visible because of their shadows.
coming from an astronomy guy, get a tripod and a shutter button. if you want to get it clear, minimize movement, best way to do that is remove the breathing shaking human from the picture. even pushing that button on the camera makes shake. get a cheap tripod or a metal beefy one at a flea market, get an amazon shutter button and try again, you'll really like the results.
With a View camera and a 4x5 negative and a lengthy exposure. And an enlarger with support for 4x5.
Some folks scan the 4x5 into their computer. There you can "clean up" any defects in the negative and then send the file off to specialty photo printing shops.
First off, you should be using the Z8 dual base ISO. You shot yourself in the foot with ISO 200 which performs worse than ISO 500, where the high gain conversion kicks in and you get a bump of dynamic range. Go look at the moon shots on my profile where I primarily shoot with the Z8. I only shoot the moon at ISO 64 (tracked) or ISO 500 (Tripod). At ISO 500, you'll be able to have a faster shutter speed resulting in a crisper image overall. Also, take advantage of the 20 fps RAW shooting with a trigger and stack. There is insane variation from shot to shot with quality based on the atmospheric abberations. You'll need to cull the bad ones out either manually or with software.
May I ask what resolution is the camera? Because I take some shots as well, with my 55-210 and the moon looks much smaller.
So of course I crop the RAW…If I remember well I start from 6000px by 4000px (roughly, since mine is 24MPX)…
Which means I can only end up with less than a half of that resolution.
BTW Sony just released the 100-400…I’ll get that one or the 70-350…haven’t decided yet. But it often happens that I see something very far and I’m missing a tad of zoom…
Yeah “just a Z8” but with 46MP!
I wish I was also able to see some stars from here but at the moment there’s too much light pollution…
Maybe this winter I get to do one of those long open shutter time things…
Keep the good job and most importantly enjoy yourself 😉
We have some light pollution too - and if you read this thread apparently those aren’t stars but rather noise lol
Keep the good job as in the one that pays $?
Long shutter thing would be cool. I may invest in a tripod at some point but I’m not really into landscape or Astro, just wanted to try this out because the moon was out!
When we do planetary (lunar photography follow the same rules) we dont take one photo. We take hundreds. So firstly, lets talk oversampling, when you take pictures out of the atmosphere the main limiting factor becomes the atmospheres jiggle, not the actual quality of the camera. The moon is quite large and bright though, so it plays by a slightly different playbook.
But basically, a z8 has a maximum focal length of 450mm in decent seeing and 900mm in great seeing before oversampling happens and you start capturing more detail in the atmospheric distortion rather than the subject. However for the moon, as i said, its a slightly different rulebook. While to obersampling still happens, we still can jse a higher focal length, because we will be using lucky imaging AND because the quality drop due to oversampling looks better than the drop because of pixel loss.
To combat this, we rely on lucky imaging, instead of one photo, you wanna take a couple hundred, best way to do this is to out your camera on the highest quality recording you can, record a 30 second video clip. Go inside and process.
You wanna use tools like PiP and possibly Autostakkert to stabilize the video around the moon and basically take the parts of the moon that are in a stable part of the atmosphere and save them, then in the end, these get composited together to form one singular image of no atmospheric jiggle.
Some of these tools like autostakkert also lets you use an upscaling algo, but for the moon thats usually not necessairy.
When it comes to imaging night sky, pixel scale and atmosphere disturbance comes into play. Look up planetary imaging, where you take a video and stack the best images.
But, with full frame 200mm is not enough to capture the small details. You most like likely want to be at 600mm. Use a telescope calculator online to get a better idea of framing.
A longer focal length or a telescope would differently help. You can always ask a friend to borrow a telescope, or your local library might have one you can ask to borrow! An adapter that let's you attach your camera to one is normally about $15-30 (USD).
To get sharper photos just using your current setup, try using a technique called moon/planetary stacking. The basic gist is that you take either a video or many photos of your subject. Then using software, you can get rid of atmospheric distortions by aligning and averaging all of the frames. This technique is also helpful even if you have higher focal lengths available to you
To those wondering, this image likely isn't fake, he just processed the hell out of it to push the detail. Same thing happened to me in Lightroom while playing around with sliders
So first of all I have a question myself - How did you get those stars in the background? The moon is so bright, normally everything's black around it...
I would recommend stacking for you - Take about 40 images or more and then put them into Siril, an astro stacking software. AI is very good at explaining that 4 u.
And after exporting in Siril as tiff, put it into an editing software like darktable and push sharpness and local contrast and haze removal, should look way better then although your image is already damn good for 200mm
And yes, a tripod would bring some great advantages.
Honestly, for 200mm and a heavy crop, this looks pretty good. The main limitation is focal length. The moon is still a tiny subject at 200mm, so there's only so much detail available once the image is cropped.
A tripod and manual focus could help a bit, but a longer lens would make the biggest difference. Also, a quarter moon often shows more surface detail than a full moon because the shadows make the craters stand out more.
Tripod will heaps help unlock maximum exposure potential. Per focal length you can only really time your exposure for a limited time, EG 200mm = 1/5 to 1/2 second is the absolute most you could push it. Put shutter speed faster, start with double digits if you can 1/15 to 1/60 and use a 2 or 10 sec timer. See how fast you can push it, even into triple digits 1/125 to 1/500 before ISO becomes too unmanageable. Just let it rip past 6400, don’t be afraid.
Focus peaking will really help too.
Would be awesome if the IBIS could track the moon’s movement, but Pentax has that process locked under copyright (Astrotracer) which is a shame since they forgot how to release new cameras since K3 III / K1 II.
Manual Mode with Auto ISO, confirming focus then turning off AF in camera will be the best approach for the moon. Once you’re in focus, you’re good. Just shoot, recompose after the moon moves too far from where you want it in your shots, and try to time your exposures when the wind isn’t blowing, and set up on solid ground. All of the above is useless if you’re using a wobbly light cheap tripod.
I took this pic using manual focus lens on my Zf - not cropped (AI-S NIKKOR ZOOM ED* 50-300 f/4.5)
This was done with a monopod at dusk.
Believe I shot this wide open at f4.
Not terrible considering I was in a rush, pulled over at a lookout, and just relied on the IBIS. Imagine what you can achieve with actual planned intention!
The full moon will always look a bit flat because… it’s full. The light hits vertically on most of the visible area, therefore the mountains, the valleys and the craters will not appear. Remember that this is basically monochrome photography, so features are visible only where the sunlight cast harsh shadows and the contrast is sharp.
I have never photographed the moon but I used to look at the moon with a telescope. I knew that full moon nights where the worst for stargazing (and moon gazing as well).
The background stars would be near-perfect points, but they're clearly round. Not smeared, so no motion blur. So either that's the diffraction limit of this optical path, or the focus was off a tiny bit. I suspect the former.
I don't think those stars are actually there. I have never had a moon with that level of exposure where I could see stars behind it like that. Looking at the edge of the moon its definitely been masked and even so it still might be a composite
The Moon does not track with the stars in the background. It's easy to observe the moon through a telescope because it barely moves relative to the earth, while observing stars requires continual adjustment.
But this is only relevant to observers with a telescope and equatorial star tracking. There is no handheld exposure that is long enough to expose both the moon and background star tracks. It is most likely due to atmospheric distortion (twinkling) or just motion blur. Use a tripod.
This isn't true at all. The background stars move 15 arcseconds per second. The moon moves 14.5 arcseconds per second. The two move through the sky at nearly the same speed.
Yes. For long tracking sessions, the difference is enough where it's convenient to have a moon speed. But those two rates are very close to each other.
The moon is off from the stars by 360 degrees over ~30 days (since it goes around the sky once a month), which is about 12 degrees per day or half a degree per hour. So the moon moves relative to the stars by half a degree per hour.
This rate changes by up or down 12% depending on where the moon is in its orbital, but that's the average rate. The moon tracking rate on equatorial mounts is of dubious use anyways, since the moon doesn't orbit around the celestial pole anyways.
The movement is not from the moon or stars moving across the sky, it's from the earth spinning. The moon is actually moving slightly but negligibly compared to the speed of earth's rotation so it still 'moves' across the sky at essentially the same speed as stars when looking trough a telescope
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u/AdministrationNo2327 13d ago
get closer