My neighbor's 2-minute moon shot tip beat my 30-minute setup

I live in Tucson and every month I drag out my telescope, laptop, and do a whole polar alignment dance to shoot the moon. Last week my neighbor Jeff, who just uses a DSLR on a tripod, told me to stop wasting time and just shoot during twilight when there's still some blue in the sky. I figured he was full of it. But I tried it with my old 200mm lens, no tracking, just a shutter speed of 1/250. The detail in the craters was way sharper than anything I got with my fancy gear. Now I'm wondering if I've been overcomplicating every astro photo for the last 4 years. Anyone else had a simple setup beat their expensive rig for a specific target?

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river_rivera4528d ago

The moon does the tracking for you, that's the dirty secret nobody tells you. At 1/250 you're freezing the motion, so all that polar alignment gear is just solving a problem you don't have anymore. I did the same thing with M42 once, tracked it for 40 minutes, then took a single 3 second shot with a 135mm and the nebula core actually looked better because I wasn't fighting the gradient from passing clouds. Your tiny window of twilight blue is basically free atmospheric stabilization compared to shooting at 2am when the air is boiling.