What lens size for Lunar Photography?

I have used 1120mm a few times (on a FF body) for moon shots and the sensor coverage is quite good, without being so large in the frame that earths rotation becomes frustrating (otherwise you need to continually adjust the tripod head between shots). In my case it's an adapted Canon 400mm F/5.6 lens with stacked 1.4x and 2x teleconverters. So I believe that another good choice would be the Sony 200-600 with a 2x TC.

And as already stated by somebody else, these are not typically worth buying just for moon photos due to their price.
 
Alternative choice: a used Tamron 150-600 in Minolta A mount + LA-EA5 adapter ( or LA-EA3 as this is an SSM lens). AF speed is slow but fast enough for moon shots and static birds and airshows ( it handles side to side aerobatics just fine ). This is a pretty sharp lens, up to 500mm. 600mm is usable for moon shots: use sequator to stack shots ( or not if you don't feel like it ) and you'll end up with shots that fill half the frame in cropped ( APS-C) mode. Sharpness depends on a lot of factor ( air temp, wind, humidity, pollution, etc) but on a good night, results will be great :)
 
Astrophotography is a whole other rabbit hole to go down, although how deep you go depends on how hard core you want to get, what equipment you already own and the depth of your pockets. If you need a long lens for another aspect of photography, it'll open up a few more possibilities when shooting the sky. All I needed was a 2" prime focus adapter to use my a6000 with my scopes. I have considered something like the 200-600 zoom and a TC because that would be handy for birds too.

As mentioned above, sharpness will become even more critical when you are doing astrophotography because even a tiny error is easily noticeable with stars in the image. Focus is my biggest problem because it can look sharp in the viewfinder, but can end up revealing focus errors when viewed on a screen. Stars require perfect focus.

Seeing is another problem when you start using any kind of magnification and when your exposures start to get longer, and then there's blurring from the Earth's rotation. At first I thought my image of totality might have been blurred by thin passing clouds but there are two stars in the image that are tiny round disks which told me my focus had drifted. Still looked great in the viewfinder. If I hadn't been chasing sucker holes in the clouds, I would have used my Bahtinov mask to focus on a star first, then move to the moon, but I felt pressured for time so I winged it. Sometimes when I'm not sure of focus, and I have the time, I'll bracket my focus a little.

It's very common for people to think that the best time to look at, and photograph the moon is when it's full. Unless you want to get a shot showing the rays around the larger craters, its not a good time, because as Ivan said, the moon looks flat. Having some shadows reveal details and give a sense of depth.

Jim, what brand is your 6" reflector? I'm curious because f5.6 is unusual.
 
I'm a complete novel at this, but NYE while I had my cam on tripod, just after the 9pm fireworks, I photographed the moon at 240mm on A7iv using sony 24-240 G series zoom.

The images below have only been cropped, not edited so they can be improved with post processing..

I read a rule called the lunar 11. 100 ISO with F11... or, is it 100 ISO with shutter speed 100?

On this shot I couldn't remember the rule, as I cannot now, so I shot shutter speed at 1/100 with ISO 100, using auto aperture. It was too dark because my apertures only go down to F6.3 at 240 focal length. A better lens would manage I figure.

I then used manual zoom (with the built-in magnification feature of the A7iv), so I could visually check the focus and exposure and thus changed the ISO from 100 to 125.

GJF03817.jpeg

Not cropped...


GJF03818.jpeg

Cropped.

I want a 200-600 right now@!


Gaz
 
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Nice job!

Yes, the Moon likes a long focal length.

Here's a shot from last month through my 1200mm fl, f8 Telescope of the Mars occultation. at this focal length Mars is starting to show a disk. I don't have any images of Mars close to the lunar limb with the Sony, because I switched to a dedicated astro-imager for real close-ups.

I'm a bit of a wing-it photographer. Since I have lots of room on my memory cards I will bracket the heck out of my exposures and pick the bests shots and trash the rest.

Exposure varies a lot with the Moon depending on the phase. In this case the 6" scope pulled in a lot of light so this is 1/600sec.

Tom

2022Nov7MarsOccultationSony09.jpg
  • ILCE-6000
  • 1/1600 sec
  • ISO 320
 
A new Sony 200-600 zoom arrived at my door late yesterday afternoon, so I grabbed my tripod and A7iv, then walked to the headland waiting for the Moon - apparently 94% full.

I used the "Loony Eleven" rule I've been reading about. First, set Aperture to F11, then match the shutter speed to ISO... In my case, SS 125 and ISO 125.

Manual Focus with zoom function works a treat. Unfortunately, it had been quite a hot day, so the heat haze, even over the ocean, was causing difficulty before the sunset behind me, as the earlier shots show.

GJF09511.jpeg


It was windy, too, so next time, I would choose SS 400 and ISO 400 for this lens to take some of the movement out of play, despite using the remote control and a sturdy Manfrotto.

GJF09526.jpeg

The Sony Imaging App was easy to use for remote on my phone. However, I had to delete all the images from the phone on completion. This is because I was shooting RAW plus jpeg, but the jpeg images automatically imported by the APP into Apple Photos were all 2Mb, which seems pretty stupid to me, as they're all 33Mb RAW and JPG on the camera. Maybe I can tweak that?

GJF09560.jpeg

I also shot Full Frame, and Crop Factor sets to compare. The Crop Factor images indicated more noise. Also, the Full Frame shots weren't as sharp. I tweaked both in Post-production, but I probably overcooked them. It would be nice to get some decent colours, sharpness and noiseless images out of the box, but I guess that's expecting too much at my skill level.

GJF09585.jpeg

I also snapped a cruise ship on the horizon and Cormorant coming towards me as the sun went down. So excuse these off-topic images, but I'm impressed with the lens, despite struggling to carry it home. Full Moon in a couple of days... So this has been good practice.

GJF09598.jpeg
 
Shooting the moon distractions....

GJF09475.jpeg

GJF09548.jpeg
 
Near to full moon tonight. I wondered what the Maxxum could do with the 500AF Reflex. Had to bump it to ISO 1600. Pleasantly surprised with the result for this first generation DSLR and a reflex lens. Uncropped.

PICT0006 by telecast, on Flickr
 
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