Full moon.

While specialist equipment and very long exposures are usually needed for photography the night sky, shooting the moon is relatively simple. A lot of the photos that are commonly seen showing a large full moon rising over a city are often shot as either double exposures or as two separate exposures that are subsequently combined together. If you use a wide angle or normal lens to include the foreground landscape, the moon will probably be a barely perceptible dot in the sky. Using a longer telephoto lens to record the moon will usually mean leaving out the foreground, so it can make sense to shoot them separately using different lens.

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Leaving aside the foreground and any compositing needed, photography the moon itself is quite easy. There are a couple of points to remember though. The light from the moon is just reflected sunlight, so you can use relatively fast shutter speeds to capture the detail. It’s best to shoot the moon when it’s full, or a couple of days on either side of full. If you want to be really precise and get the biggest moon possible, Chinese tradition holds that the full moon that brings the mid-autumn festival is the biggest and brightest of the year. In 2010, that occurs on September 22nd.

Exposing for the moon is simple. At ISO100, f8 and 1/250 is adequate for a full moon. If it’s a crescent moon, change the shutter speeds by 1-2 stops (1/125 or 1/60) to let enough light in. It goes without saying that the longer the lens the better, although with modern DSLRs with big sensors such as the Canon 5D Mark II you have a lot of leeway for cropping.

It’s worth noting that if you do try to capture the moon and foreground in a single shot, you’ll probably need a much longer exposure in order to properly expose the foreground. However the moon moves surprisingly quickly. Every two minutes it moves a distance equal to its diameter, so if you try to capture a scene with a long exposure, the moon may well end up looking like an overly bright blur.

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