Another moon photo

Took this hand held with a Tamron 70-300 at 300. Cropped heavily and sharpened slightly in Picasa2. What do you think?

I think I am increasingly impressed by the capabilities of the Tamron 300mm zooms. For the price they seem to be very sharp, you have a lot of crater detail there in the lower left hand corner.

300 is really a little short for the moon, so this is about as good as you could expect to get. Very nice.

Superb.
What exposure and shutter speed

Great detail. Curious about the exposure and shutter as well.

It appears to be 1/500s at F8, ISO 560.

There's a free extension for Firefox called "Exif Viewer". Can't recommend it highly enough.

I'd agree with this. The sharpening has been slightly overdone, I think, since noise is starting to become apparent. Might be able to get it slightly better by setting the camera back to neutral sharpness (this gets recorded in the Exif too) and only sharpening (once) on the computer. Although the moon does move very fast, 1/500s is a bit faster than really necessary, so maybe a lower ISO next time would give you a bit less noise.

Thanks for all your comments.

Chris, I think I can see what you mean about the over-sharpening. I appreciate your feedback.

Just curious! What is your recommendation for a shutter speed for shooting the moon. I have been trying with a slower speed to try and get some framing effects with the foreground (trees etc - the effect is quite good but it just blurs the moon).

From the table at the bottom of the article here, the angle of view with a 300mm lens is about 4.6 degrees.

The moon moves at 360/24 = 15 degrees per hour, or 0.25 degrees per minute, so 0.004 degrees per second.

This might not sound much, but if the moon tracks horizontally across the 3872 pixel wide K10D frame, this represents a blur of 16 pixels.

So an exposure shorter than 1/16 will be a blur smaller than 1 pixel.

At 1/60, the blur will be about a quarter of a pixel, which I doubt you'd see.

Some may shake their heads but that makes sense to me. Thanks. I will do it different next time.

Um, think that's not quite right.

If the whole field of view is 4.6 degrees, and the moon travels 0.004 degrees every second, and the width of the sensor is 3872 pixels, then the pixels 'travelled' by the moon would be given by the ratios:

4.6/0.004 = 3872/p

4.6 = (3872*0.004)/p

p = (3872*0.004)/4.6

p = 3.4

So about 1/15s would give a quarter pixel blur, which Chris doubts you'd see.

But the best thing to do is try some out and let us know. This all depends on using a sturdy tripod, and the above calculations are for a 300mm lens, don't forget.

Dan

P.S. If that's wrong, please tell me!

Thank you both. I wont argue over the numbers but what I have done in the past was way too slow. I will get up in to that range of shutter speed and have a bit of a muck around.

if you have a 2x teleconverter, the moon is bright enough that you could probably get away with 600 F11 with reasonable results.

You're quite right Dan. Again. (It was you that caught me out with sloppy arithmetic over magnification factors IIRC).

I obviously need to go back to primary school.