Photographing the Moon

The Full Moon

The Moon, something everyone has seen and admired, is our closest neighbor in space. Whether it's with their phone camera or a DSLR, most people have tried taking pictures of the Moon. It is bright, pretty, and easy to photograph making it a popular target for amateurs and professionals alike. I too have tried many times, but it wasn’t until recently, that I started getting good results.

I have been photographing the Moon ever since I’ve been able to get my hand on a DLSR, but my goal never used to be about getting detail on the moon. But after that first time that I pointed my telescope at the Moon and was awestruck by how pretty it was, did I decide that wanted to capture the Moon in detail.

I originally tried to do this using my telescope, but after trying multiple times, I realized that it wouldn’t work. The field of view was too small and the whole moon didn’t fit in the frame. This combined with the fact that I am not using a tracker made it hard for the software to work properly. This meant that I wouldn’t be able to use my telescope. So instead, I attached my telephoto lens to my camera and pointed it at the Moon.

I tried taking photos during Full Moon many times, but I was never quite satisfied. Then in January, I realized something.

Instead of trying during the Full Moon, in early January, I decided to photograph the waxing crescent moon. It was chilly, but I was able to take 4 videos and a lot of pictures. The pictures came out really well so I was hoping that the processed images that came from the video would be better. Except they weren’t, the detail was better in the unprocessed image, than in the image that came from aligning and stacking the video. It was so bad, that I saw less detail in the image than I saw in the live view of my camera when I was taking pictures. I was really confused, cause I thought that the pre-processing/processing would improve the quality of the image. I thought, “maybe there’s a problem with the software”, but no matter how many times I input the video, the output image looked the same. It took me a while but I finally figured out why the image from the video was worse.

The top image was produced from stacking a video, while the bottom image is a single shot. Both were taken on the same day

My camera takes pictures at a higher quality than it takes video. The camera I use is the Canon EOS Rebel t5i, and it can take 18 Megapixel images, but can only take video at 1080p(2MP). This means that even though processing a video can improve image quality, it will still be worse than just taking an 18 MP image. This simple logic is why from now one I will just stick to taking pictures, instead of videos, of the moon.

I haven’t posted in the last month, because I have had a lot more work, but I am back and posting. If you have any questions or would like to share your own pics, feel free to so.