You might prefer to brose the visual index of my moon photos here You might prefer to brose the visual index of my moon photos here
Moon Sets into the Trees, 3/8/2008 HAS Site
The moon above was about 32 hours old, about 2.5% illuminated.
Still More DSLR Pictures of the moon are here.
This is nominally my "main" moon page and will feature some of my best shots and/or latest & greatest. This moon picture is on the cover of a book!
Above: Moon Picture, 3/30/2004
1/80 second, Tak FS-102 telescope, Nikon D100 digital camera, Nikon TC-14 1.4x teleconverter
Moon Age: 10 days 4 hours, 70% visible. See below for labeled versions.
 Click thumbnail above for FULL Size!!! |  Rayed craters Keppler and Copernicus. Grimaldi on upper left. 1/23/05, 98% full, 1/80 sec Nikon D100, Takahashi TOA 130 telescope |  Non-Inverted Rukl Orientation |
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Astronomy Pictures: Dick Locke's Astrophoto Gateway page....
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3/30/2004 Moon Photography Notes: Seeing was excellent this night. I'm to the point where I don't bother shooting the moon unless seeing is excellent (as I know the results will be disappointing). Even so, getting a good sharp shot is kind of a crap shoot regarding seeing and focus. The great thing about the D100 is that I can see the histogram of the image right after shooting, so getting a "perfect" exposure is almost foolproof now. Beats the heck out of bracketing with film, or even trying to judge given my other digicam's picture (without a histogram).
On this image I applied curves to each RGB channel independently to increase per-channel contrast. I completely ignored what this did to the color. I then used channel mixer to blend the RGB channels into a monochrome image (channel mixer allows you to choose how much of each RGB channel to mix into the final image). After that, I converted to LAB to sharpen the luminance channel with a pretty heavy hand, and back to RGB for the web.
So the combination of good glass, exposure, camera, seeing, focus, and processing came together on this one! (Not to mention, I shot this when the moon was at the zenith, and with a refractor I was literally laying on my back on my deck centering and focusing this shot! I couldn't quite see laying flat, so had to do some crunches to get close enough to see the viewfinder well. So there was physical effort as well...)
