Sharpening challenge

When I see a bright moon, I can't resist having one more go at nailing a sharp image. Unfortunately the longest lens I have is the 55-300.
Below are this week's attempts (100% crops).
The first moon appears sharpest, the next is yesterday, earlier in the evening, but softer (possibly due to full 300mm).
Finally - a link to yesterday's raw file for you to play with
Have a go at revealing as much genuine detail as poss. Try to avoid artifacts and halos and noise. I think maintaining the blue would be good (unlike mine), but it's up to you.
I'm happy to judge, but I'm more interested to hear your comments and let you decide.



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Here's the raw file to play with
Good luck!
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never done this before - how can I upload an image directly in the thread - do I have to store it first soimewhere online and use the url or how does it work?
Sorry - I guess this is a very basic question

Yes, that's it exactly Axel.
Most image hosting sites provide you with the URL to the image.
Alternatively, right click on your image on the net, and go 'View image' the URL to the image will then be in the address bar.
Copy this, then click the 'image' button here and paste the URL in the field provided.

Here is my effort, didnt want to crop so much, sharpened in LR 3.6, saturated the blue a little, boosted the blacks a little...

just noticed shutter speed of 1/60 on 300mm, did you use a tripod??? the moon is moving at 1000s of mph you know

can provide the same level of sharpening with the original dark blue sky, but I thought that a moon picture in such a magnification must be a space photo and it is dark there - hence, it looks more natural (and therefore sharper ) when using the dark background (this is no B&W - just the background is turned to black)
sharpened moon

Cool, nice one guys. I prefer Axel's closer, black one; that is very cleanly sharpened (bit of a halo on the right), but much better than my messy effort
Gary, yours makes a nice photo, nice and clean. Would prefer it a bit bigger for this challenge.
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Do we think that 100 percent crop is never going to be very nice?

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DAL 55-300, tripod, severely cropped & sharpened, but not much as I remember

This one is from last year, when we had the 'close moon'. Close in astronomical terms of course is not that close, it did seem a 'little' bigger in the sky though?

A little messing about in Aperture, and PhotoShop.

John.

I quite like the dark blue of the sky, sharpened, adjusted WB, boosted clarity, higher black levels, adjusted contrast and then added tonal contrast, maybe a little OTT:

Wow! amazing to see what can be done with something I played with unsuccessfully.
Galoot, lol (your ship needs to be flipped horizontally to get the shadow the right way round)
DrOrloff, strewth! ott maybe, but wow! was that my picture? That would look fine in an encyclopedia

BTW, tripod? yes - mirror up.
60th, yep, is that fast enough?

Ah, there is a large Klingon Bird of Prey near The Enterprise, which is blocking the light from the front right. What you get is a reflection from the moon and some light flashing from a supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy to the far left.

Hope that puts things in perspective

Are you sure it's not a Borg cube? Size wise, it would do the job.

If the Enterprise was within the Earth's shadow then it would only be lit by the moon in which case the shadow is correct.

I thought the addition of the cloaked ship sneaking up behind was a nice touch!

(Actually, what I never understood about Star Trek was that whenever ships appeared together they were always aligned on the same axes in the way that aeroplanes would be. But if they were in space (or even in orbit) then this would be pointless. Can anyone explain?)

You need a very clear night for moon shots, preferably somewhere without a lot of pollution in the atmosphere, that will allow you to shoot fast enough to avoid camera shake, shutter speeds of 1/500 to 1/1000 should be easily achievable.

Can't be a Borg Cube, they never tangled with Kirk