Moon shot

Once, long ago, I tried to get into astrophotography. This didn't last long because of the cost of film and my ignorance of photography--those rolls of blurry pics got expensive. But I've been restoring my telescope of late, and my XTi has reawakened that desire in me. Sans telescope, I decided to go out the other night and experiment. This is the result.



This was taken using my Canon Rebel XTi with a EF 75-300mm lens (this is the original one, folks--no USM, no IS) on a tripod. I played around for a while, trial-and-erroring it until I settled on an aperture of 20 with a shutter speed of 1/160 and ISO of 400. RAW mode. Mirror lockup was on, and I triggered the shutter remotely with the Canon RC-1. I shot several dozen images. This one was arrived at by selecting eight of the best looking individual shots, adjusting the histogram for each RGB channel on each photo, and averaging the shots two-by-two and stacking in Photoshop, then sharpening. The final step was cropping the frame down by 75 percent or so.

It's not a great lunar shot, but it's pretty darn nice considering the 75-300's reputation and the horrible light pollution in my skies.

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