Ever since I saw my friend’s photos of the moon, I knew I wanted to try taking photos of the moon too.  I’ve heard of photographers shooting the moon, but I didn’t really understand the excitement until I tried it myself.  Yesterday was a full moon, but it was too cloudy, but tonight was a great night for experimenting because it was a clear sky.

I used a Nikon telephoto 70-300mm lens to take these pictures. It’s an older lens that doesn’t have vibration reduction (image stabilization in Canon speak), so if you don’t have the newer lens, don’t sweat it. I didn’t even use a tripod for this (confession: I don’t own one yet!), so you don’t have one either, it’s okay too! Just switch your DSLR to manual mode, stabilize the camera, and start shooting away.

I never knew I would be able to see so much detail of the moon with my camera!  Not bad for trying to shoot something out of this world!  I really like the crater detail near the edges of the moon.  Now I am really curious to know what I will see if I shoot the other phases of the moon!

This image is straight of the camera so you can compare how much I cropped the image above.  I shot the moon in the dead center to get the sharpest image possible.