tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14039217.post-1120252670845838472005-07-01T14:01:00.000-07:002005-07-01T14:25:44.416-07:00On the last Full Moon day, I tried my hands on shooting the Moon. Having no access to expensive Astro-photography equipment, I just mounted my Rebel XT with the canon 75-300mm USM on my Hakuba S4500 tripod. I first used the camera to meter the moon, and then scaled it down about 2 f-stops. The moon was still way over-exposed:<br /><a href="http://samya.smugmug.com/photos/26714298-O-1.jpg"><img src="http://samya.smugmug.com/photos/26714298-S-1.jpg" /><span class="down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"></span></a><br />Then I started playing around with the aperture and shutter speeds and got some more reasonably decent shots. Check them out in my <a href="http://samya.smugmug.com/gallery/628451/">moon album.</a><br /><a href="http://samya.smugmug.com/photos/26714305-O-1.jpg"><img src="http://samya.smugmug.com/photos/26714305-S-1.jpg" /></a><br />They are not absolutely perfect. But then, I didn't have a L series lens at my disposal. Things learnt:<br />Good thing:<br />1. I used a tripod, and used the timer instead of pressing the shutter myself. That saved some camera shake in such long exposures.<br />Things I missed:<br />1. Unforgivable. I forgot to set the RAW mode and was shooting JPEG.<br />2. I should have used MLU (Mirror Lock Up).<br />While discussing this, someone pointed me to a neat tool named <a href="http://registax.astronomy.net/">Registax</a>. Check it out. Potentially you can take more than one shots and stack them up to increase sharpness!! Will have to try it sometime.<br />This is the e-mail I got from Steve Sprengel:<br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(102, 255, 255);">Besides MLU and a more steady tripod configuration, try a little faster<br />shutter speed, higher f-stop, and STACK 10+ images using Registax so<br />you'll be able to sharpen things up quite a bit after reducing the noise<br />via stacking:<br /><br /><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.pbase.com/ssprengel/image/39049737" target="_blank">http://www.pbase.com/ssprengel<wbr>/image/39049737</a><br /><br /><br />The maximum number of images in the stack will be limited to about two<br />minutes worth, before the moon has rotated too much for the features to<br />be aligned between the beginning and the end frames of the sequence.<br /><br />Keep in mind that the noise is reduced by the squareroot of the number<br />of images, so to reduce the noise by half you'll have to stack four<br />images, to reduce it by one fourth you'll have to stack 16.<br /><br />The other thing to understand that when stacking images of a relatively<br />large object like the moon, the features will shift with respect to<br />each other due to atmospheric distortions, so a winter night moon high<br />in the sky will be much better than a summer night moon low in the sky.</blockquote>Some interesting info on shooting moon <a href="http://dpfwiw.com/moon.htm">HERE</a>Indiangeeknoreply@blogger.com