Why is so dang hard to take a good picture of the moon in the night sky?
In: Technology
What are you using? A smartphone, an entry-level point-and-shoot, a mid-range mirrorless, a professional DSLR? This is the most important question. The next most important question is: are you using a tripod?
The moon moves and your hands shake, so using a tripod will make your shots a lot better.
If you have a camera with manual settings control, general consensus on appropriate settings will be ISO 100, aperture in the range of f/8-f/11, and shutter speed of around 1/100-1/150.
The primary reason that moon photos turn out shitty when using a smartphone camera, a point and shoot camere, or even a DSLR with the wrong lense and wrong settings, is really straight forward.
The moon is a tiny bright light in the sky, which is a vast field of darkness. When the camera tries to meter and expose for a tiny point of light against a large field of darkness, it overexposes the point of light and underexposes the rest and you end up with a photo that looks like a bright white dot and nothing else (and with no detail in the moon).
If you were to put your smartphone camera lens up to a telescope eyepiece, however, so that the camera could “see” the moon as a much bigger portion of the picture, then it would be able to detect the areas of darkness and light on the moon’s surface and the exposure would greatly improve because it wouldn’t be simply one bright point against total darkness, but a more nuanced display of the color/texture/illumination of the moon.
This holds true for all sorts of other situations too, by the way. Take, for example, a photograph of an open doorway at night. At a distance the door is just a bright rectangle of light. The closer you get to the door, taking additional pictures, the more detail is revealed inside the doorway. This isn’t just because you are getting closer to the objects, it’s because the more of the frame the doorway fills (compared to the empty space of the darkness around the doorway) the better the camera is able to meter the scene and expose it properly so the highlights aren’t blown out. Eventually, when you got to the point where you were close enough that you were standing in the doorway, the metering would be very good because the camera wouldn’t be attempting to balance the inky black of the night outside the door with the bright light of the scene inside the door, but just working with the bright interior of the door and room inside instead.
Where the question has already been answered, I’ll take this opportunity to plug a book I recently started reading that you might enjoy. Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe by Alan Hirshfeld. The first part of the book is all about how early (modern) astronomers had a horrible time trying to photograph celestial objects like the moon.
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