A.R.S.E.

Dr. Pain wrote:Getting somewhere now. I happy with this. Gave it a unsharp mask in photoshop, 150%, and cropped it.

There is a small amount of cyan/yellow chromatic aberration at the top and bottom of the moon. You can see it in the high contrast areas of that image.

It's not a disaster and can be easily corrected in Lightroom or ACR.

It will also improve the overall sharpness of the shot.

Yep, just a click of the mouse.


Sent from Han Solo using TK-421's phone.

Cool thanks for the advice JD.

By the way, and I think Dex will agree with this, sharpening should be the last task in your raw workflow.

I took a few pics of the blood moon last night and I really struggled to manual focus in the low light. I can't get the view finder to my vision. I'm short sighted and wear glasses so I'm thinking of getting an eyepiece corrector and see how that goes. I find all my pics on manual are fuzzy and it's damn annoying. I took this on auto as I cracked it.

That doesn't look too bad to me!

I manual focused all of mine using live view on the back of the camera, then zoomed in 10x... it's all pixelated and noisy, but you can move the focus back and forth to try and resolve the most information. You shouldn't need amazing vision to get that right.

I would have been pretty happy with that shot!
I tried early on handheld, which as you'd expect turned out pretty badly! Had a try later on a tripod and had moderate success. Your shot blows mine out of the water..

Considering how far away the moon is, wouldn't you just be focussing at infinity? (I know nothing about astrophotography, by the way).

Looks good to me.

I do the same as Dex. Live view zoomed in to 10x and small manual adjustments on a really contrasty bit like the craters at the top. The only tricky part of that is that the moon moves really fast through the view so you have to be quite quick at it. It's also important to use a shutter release or the inbuilt timer to fire it off as the long lens tends to wobble a fair bit.

I did try the live view but didn't zoom in 10x so I will have to try that.

I had trouble zooming infinite last night as I couldn't find much bright enough at distance. Besides a street light out the front it's quite dark here which is great for night sky shots but a real bugger to get infinite zoom.

I need to spend more time with my camera as I haven't been doing much of late with it.

Cursed wrote:Considering how far away the moon is, wouldn't you just be focussing at infinity? (I know nothing about astrophotography, by the way).

Yes. But that's usually a tiny bit back on the lens... It will focus past infinity. Usually that's the case for zoom lenses... Some manual focus lenses will have a hard stop right on infinity. I've often pondered why, but never really looked into it. There could be a few reasons... AF motors might not like constantly hitting a wall, and may slightly front of back focus. Shooting outside the visible spectrum also shifts focus due to different wavelengths of light, perhaps that's a reason.

Anyway, it can make it difficult to get focus critical. You certainly can't just stick it on infinity on the lens and assume it's in focus. What Kev said as well... use shutter release/timer. The mirror will also wobble a long lens... learn how to shoot with mirror lockup or use live view. Keep in mind live view heats up the sensor though... this creates additional sensor noise.

Thanks, Dex. I learned something tonight.

I've learnt something too. I did go out and have a play with live view but also played with the diopter again this afternoon and I did get better results but I was shooting a full moon. I need to try it on a crescent moon or lower light. I did find manual focus through the viewfinder but shooting in live view got me a good pic. I do want to get a telescope and hang the camera off it so this info is really helpful and I'm getting somewhere again. Thanks Dex and Kev!

I've been getting frustrated with my eye sight and my camera of late. Being short sighted I can't adjust the diopter far enough so I can shoot without glasses. When I do shoot in glasses, everything is slightly blurred and I have to auto focus. Live view on my Nikon eats my battery time fast.