Celebrating the Supermoon

Decided at the last minute to try my hand at photographing the supermoon tonight.  The first order of business of course was to get the camera and tripod all set up with all the proper night sky settings. I decided on F8 for an aperture, 1/30th of a second for a shutter speed and ISO 100 to limit long exposure noise. I also wanted to try out live view which actually makes selecting the shutter speed pretty simple. You just dial it in until it looks right 🙂

Then the problem of where and when… so I went outside and made sure I had an

unobstructed view of the eastern mountainside. But exactly where and when? A quick search of the internet showed that the information I was going to need could be found on timeanddate.com, including general moonrise time, current azimuth and elevation angle which really came in handy since I have a mountain between me and the horizon. I estimated the mountaintop to be about 10 or 15 degrees which helped me to figure out when I was actually going to see it. Unfortunately there was a cloud over that part of the mountain so I couldn’t get the mountain in the shot and I had to wait even longer for the moonrise!

At first I used manual focus along with the enlarge button for the LCD screen. Blowing up the moon on the screen really helped to get the right focus. I also tried out the touch screen focus method which I actually liked better. Touching the screen tells the camera where you would like to focus and also triggers the shutter. I had a two second timer set so that any camera shake set off by the touch would have time to settle down.

Well anyway, I got a couple of shots I am semi happy with… I don’t have the greatest equipment for astrophotography but it’s not really my thing anyway. I just do it for fun once in a while 🙂