Photographing the moon and getting a stellar shot of our nearest celestial neighbor requires some knowledge of the right techniques, tools, and timings. Here's how to get started.
With technical progress and the improvement over the years of camera equipment, it's no surprise that astrophotography has not only become more popular but also more accessible. It stands to reason that our nearest neighbor in space is one of the most photographed objects out there. It's also an obvious place to get started, as it requires less complex techniques than some other more advanced ways of capturing the night sky. If you're looking for a guide to photographing a supermoon, we have a dedicated guide for that here.
To begin, you may be surprised that you can get impressive photographs of the moon with some of the best camera phones — the key thing is finding a way of keeping your phone stable. If you're looking for detail, however, and you want the best possible chance of capturing the intricacies and details of the moon's surface, you'll need to invest in one of the best cameras for astrophotography. Combined with a decent lens and a sturdy tripod, you'll be able to start capturing decent images before you know it, and it may not set you back as much as you'd expect financially.
Before you get going, it's worth acquainting yourself with what to look for on the lunar surface and gaining a passing knowledge of the moon's phases and what the night sky is doing on any given day. It's also worth considering the kind of shot you'll be looking to get, as this will affect where you travel to photograph the moon and the kind of camera kit you'll be using. We've gone into more detail about this in the next section.
Cameras and lenses: Things to consider
Each area of lunar photography gets you different results, and each has individual specific styles associated with them.
- Wide-field, landscape-based photography with the moon in the scene
- Wide-field conjunction images where the moon is close to one or more of the brighter planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter etc.)
- High-resolution lunar photography
- Lunar eclipse photography
The good news is that a top end camera is not always necessary to achieve excellent results. It's worth spending the money on a decent lens, but as is often the case, many older SLR bodies that you can pick up cheaply on the second-hand market can deliver fantastic quality provided they are paired with the right lenses. If you are looking to capture wide-field landscape photography, a wider angled lens up to 50-85mm might suite you well, but for detailed images, it would be worth looking at one of the best telephoto zooms to get started.
Equipment and accessories
One of the nice things about photographing the moon is that you don't need fancy smartphone tracking devices or apps to explore the night sky — just a camera, a good lens and a decent tripod. Some of the best tripods on the market won't set you back too much and can be useful in a wide variety of other photography too. Although it's relatively bulky, our current favorite is the Benro Mach3 9X CF Series 3 tripod, which is very easy to set up and take down and can support heavier or longer lenses with ease.
Photographic Styles
As we've mentioned before, there are a range of styles when it comes to taking photos of the moon, and each requires slightly different equipment. Wide-field photography will require lenses of around 10-50mm in focal length, and we'd recommend looking for one with a maximum aperture of 1.8mm to ensure you're getting good low-level light performance when you're trying to capture the relatively dark landscape around you.
If possible, steer clear of lower-quality, cheap lenses. This will help you avoid problems such as chromatic aberration, where fine details can appear smeared and bright. High-contrast edges (such as those around craters on the moon) are marred with spurious colors by different wavelengths of light swing brought to focus at slightly different positions.
Wide-field photography
When taking wide-field lunar photos, which typically include some terrestrial foreground, the camera should be mounted on a firm tripod to prevent it from wobbling and allow careful framing of the scene. Composition is crucial to good results, and it's worth traveling to open rural ground to minimize light pollution and maximize the amount of light the camera picks up from the moon.
For something as bright as the moon, you'll shoot at a pretty low ISO of 100-400 to keep noise to a minimum. A remote cable release is helpful — but not essential — since you can also use the camera self-timer to avoid camera shake when taking the shots.
Focus on the scene carefully. Autofocus can work well on the moon, but if it's struggling, try manual focusing using live view and zooming in on the screen to ensure the detail is sharp. Exposure times will vary depending on the lighting conditions, but try shooting between f/6.5 and f/9 to get a well-balanced shot.
The best times to shoot wide-field lunar photos are during sunset or sunrise, particularly when the moon presents a crescent in the twilight sky or when it is close to one of the brighter planets. Moonrise and moonset produce especially striking images, with the deeply colored lunar disk presented against a foreground scene.
Shooting Moon detail shots
For capturing the moon's detail and features, a longer telephoto lens is necessary and we would be looking at something around the 200-400mm focal length. They can reveal a considerable amount of detail across the lunar disk, including impact craters on the surface, but they are expensive. If you have the budget, we love the Sony FE 200-600 f/5.6 – 6.3 G Master OSS, but for photographing the moon, as it's so close, you may not need something so heavy-duty. The Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 S will still provide you with good results.
As the moon is so bright, you may be able to afford to lose a few f-stops by attaching a 2x teleconverter to your lens, magnifying a shorter zoom length. These converters are much more affordable than an outright telephoto lens and still produce good results.
Shooting close-ups
If you're looking to really zoom in, there are a few different considerations to bear in mind, principally the quality of your tripod, which will need to be sturdy enough to withstand even the smallest wobbles. We prefer using live view if you have it available for close-ups, zooming in to really get a clear view of what the camera is seeing.
The phase of the moon plays a role in the appearance of the lunar features that are visible in close-up photos. When the moon is close to full, the disk can look flat due to sunlight falling directly onto it. A better time to try taking close-up photos is when the moon is away from being full — around half phase — so that the sun's rays are perpendicular to the surface, which brings out its rugged topography and layers that are dotted with shadow-filled craters, bright highlands and dark valleys.
You'll be setting your cameras ISO low, as there will be a lot of light entering the camera's sensor – no more than ISO 400 will work and exposure times will also be very short depending on the lunar phase, any clouds that are obscuring parts of the moon and the general weather conditions in the upper atmosphere.
It's always a good idea to stop down the lens a little, as many lenses produce their sharpest images when not wide open (using f/4 to f/9 instead of f/2.8 for example). Remember that the moon is constantly moving (it travels at 2,288mph), and Earth is rotating too, so longer exposures won't produce the best results. For close-ups we find the best results happen around 1/125 to 1/500 second, and if you can achieve that with an aperture of between f/6.5 and f/13, you'll end up with a crisp, clear photo.
Of course, there's an exception to the above, and that's during a lunar eclipse. These occur when the moon becomes either partially or completely obscured by Earth's shadow and can see the moon turn a striking coppery color, giving rise to the 'blood moon' description. During a total lunar eclipse, the moon becomes fainter than normal, requiring longer exposure times and higher ISO settings for extra sensitivity.
Photographing the moon is a great way to get into astrophotography and learn the basic techniques of understanding what your camera sees when you point it at the night sky. Photos of the moon also work well when blended with more traditional landscape photos, so it's a great way to get started and transition your landscape shots into more of a nighttime orientation. Before long, you'll be working on more advanced techniques and skills, such as capturing lunar occultation when planets disappear behind the moon, such as in this stunning shot by photographer Josh Dury.
