Well for me, it's because it's a technical, rather than a creative problem to solve - mostly I don't do creativity too well.

As anyone who's tried will confirm, without a telescope, it's not as easy as it looks, and getting something with just a camera and a lens (admittedly a biggish one) that shows much more detail than you could ever see with the naked eye is quite satisfying, I find.

There are quite a lot of variables - you're very dependent on air quality, so it's not even possible to get a good shot of the moon a lot of the time.

Accurate focus can be tricky, and even the post processing on the computer isn't completely trivial.

So all in all, it's quite interesting, at least to me.

I'm looking forward to having a go with the K-3, and seeing if the results are any better than with the K-5.

It depends how you measure movement blur. Sure, if the pixels are smaller, a 1 pixel blur will need a shorter exposure to eliminate than a 1 pixel blur if the pixels are bigger. But that doesn't mean that in practice you'll notice any difference.

For a start unless you view the image at 100%, you're throwing pixels away anyway, so you couldn't possibly tell in the final image.

And movement that crosses a smaller 1px boundary may not look any less sharp than movement that didn't cross a larger 1px boundary, but which wasn't as sharp in the first place.

All you know is that if you have movement that crosses a pixel boundary during the exposure, your image isn't as sharp as it would have been if you'd used a shorter exposure that prevented it.

So the maximum possible sharpness (ie absence of movement blur) achievable with the K-3 requires a shorter exposure than the maximum possible sharpness achievable with the K30. But that only reflects the fact that there's more detail available with a higher resolution sensor.

You can think of it as using the faster shutter speed on the K-3, to prevent the loss of detail that you wouldn't have been able to see at all on the K30

Yes of course. I'd have to repeat the calculation, but IIRC I worked on the basis of the angle of view of a K10D sensor and a 500mm lens (or maybe 400mm, since I don't think I had the Bigma at the time - I used a SMC-A 400mm F5.6 for my earlier moon shots). So it would be a bit shorter for a 1px blur with the more recent higher-res sensors.

Feel free to save me the effort of working it all out again for the K-5

Yes, but it's lit obliquely relative to the observer, whereas it's lit (virtually) directly at full moon.

Are you saying this is wrong?

And this (fifth paragraph)?

I worked it all out once - don't have the details to hand, but I seem to recall that the movement blur is, surprisingly, less than a pixel on the sensor with exposures as slow as about 1/25.

Certainly you're Ok at 1/100, even with the higher resolution of the K-3. Though you need to take a lot more care about ensuring that the tripod doesn't shake.

Here's one of mine:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Moons/IMGP0800-1.jpg[/IMG]

K-5 1/100s, F10, ISO 100

And another, with the 50-500:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Moons/IMGP0159-3.jpg[/IMG]

A bit underexposed, possibly, I overcompensated for the fact that the full moon is enormously brighter than when it's not full. It always looks better when the light is slightly from the side, though - the shadows create a lot more interesting detail.

The good Dr Orloff is the king of moonshots around here, I seem to recall.

At 1/1000s, you really don't need to worry much about shake.

And you can afford to have the lens much wider open than F14, thereby giving yourself the chance of using an ISO less than 3200.

Not at all bad, though.

Not a mistake

http://www.magezinepublishing.com/

Top tip: research properly before assuming something is wrong. Especially before calling them out in public over it

I do concede that I'm a total cynic, but I'm always delighted to be proved wrong

It doesn't happen often enough, sadly

Actually, I must admit I'm dead pleased at the way the K-3 price has been creeping down. It's happened a lot earlier than I was expecting, and I'm quite optimistic about being able to get one in the not too distant future.

It's quite interesting that the way they're bringing the price down is to throw in the 35mm prime - it's not just SRS, Jessops are doing it too (not that I'd buy it from there).

They'll soon fix that.

Someone's at the beer a bit early on a Friday...