Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

As I wrote in the previous entry, our attempt to take pictures of the moon last night was met with some thick fog. Tonight, however, the sky was very clear. So I set up the digital camera on a tripod in my driveway, set the camera to the maximum optical zoom (8x), and pointed it at the moon.

Using the automatic settings, here’s the result.

The cool thing about this picture is that by over-exposing the lit crescent part of the moon, the dark part of it becomes clearly visible. You can see a tad bit of detail there if you look closely. The drawback is, as you continue to expose the bright part, noise builds in the camera’s CCD chip, as you can see.

This next picture is much better. The shutter was open for 1/250th second at f/2.8. The detail really comes out. I’ve applied a slight unsharp mask to the picture, but nothing else has been enhanced.

That’s more like it. Again, it’s a simple point, zoom, and shoot with the camera mounted on a tripod.

Pretty cool.