Photo of the Week: Full Moon on Christmas Day

Astrophotography, Photo of the Week
No Comments
124 View(s)
Reading Time: 2 minutes
This page may contain affiliate links. This means I receive a small commission if you choose to purchase through a link I provide (at no extra cost to you). This helps me continue to bring awesome free content to you!

I hope everyone had a great christmas and holidays so far. No this is not the Death Star, it’s a full moon on Christmas Day.

This year we were lucky and had a full moon on Christmas Day. The last festive full moon was in 1977 – 38 years ago and the next one is not due until 2034 according to NASA.

Festive Full Moon
Festive Full Moon

For the Photographer:

To get the picture right I had to play a bit with my camera until I got it. First I thought about long exposure to get some stars with the moon. But even a 2-second exposure turned out to be fatal. The moon was too blurry. When you look at the moon, he doesn’t really seem to move. Try a 2-second exposure and you get a terrible blurred image. I used my 70-200mm with a 2x converter, this brings me to a zoom of 400 mm for this picture.

So I ramped up my ISO to 640, set my aperture to 13 and let the camera do the exposure calculation. Make sure you set your camera to “center-weight” exposure. If not, the camera tries to expose the black around the moon as well to get an even grey image. My camera calculated the exposure to be 1/250. Being set up on a tripod this was no problem and to further prevent shaking I used also mirror lockup and a 2-second timer.

I took a bunch of pictures just to make sure I have one good one. It’s hard to judge the quality on the little screen. After that some post processing in Lightroom and after quiet a bit of cropping here we are.

 

Astrophotography, Moon, Photo of the Week, Photography
Status Matches Everywhere Right Now – a Small Overview
Lounge Review: British Airways Galleries Business Lounge – South – London Heathrow Terminal 5 – LHR
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x