The night is dark but the moon is bright. Why am I saying this? Because you are tented to overexpose the moon due of the darkness of the night, and since for this shot, if its full moon, you want to see the dark sports, or, if its not full moon but rather half moon (and I recommend so), you want to see craters.
The camera I used is poor for this kind of things:
Canon Powershot A520
To obtain these at a moon partial eclipse, I needed no more than:
Tv (Shutter Speed): 1/200
Av (Aperture Value): 5.5
Focal Length: 23.2mm
Zoom: x4
Digital Zoom: x 2.7
Light Metering: Evaluative
ISO Speed: 50 -> i don’t want any noise at all since i got a tripod
When photographing the Moon, always use a tripod even if the exposure time is not as big as you think. Use the camera’s highest resolution and zoom settings (this is the bigger the better thing). Its no use to shoot in colour mode, so do it in B&W. For my second picture, since I used a telescope, the moons light was greater than I expected so I even used a green filter to reduce the amount of light coming to the camera. (a green moon filter for telescopes since I can’t even look with open eye to the full moon at 24x magnification of the telescope)
Exposure compensation : -2
Exposure time: 1/20
The inconvenient about using a telescope is that you can hardly attach the camera to the telescopes ocular so that the lenses will be at perfect distance in order to easy focus the moon and not the oculars lens on one side, and, on the other side, there is a powerful distortion on the sides of the picture. The more the camera compresses an image, the greater the loss of picture quality, so if you have the possibility, take your shots in RAW mode.
“So this is how you photograph the moon…” you say after reading this.
But my answer is: “No. This is how you shoot the moon”. I just love how that sounds.
