Full moon before the eclipse
I have always had problems photographing the moon. Even the fullest of moons are difficult to have, with details, in any photo of something else. Night photography frequently involves leaving the shutter open for a few seconds and then things get even worse. The moon ends up looking more like lens flare than the highlight of your photo.
A couple weeks back we had an eclipse. I didn’t stay up for it, even though the sky was clear, because it wasn’t scheduled to happen until 4 a.m. and by then I thought the moon may be behind a mountain if I tried to view it from home. Even if it wasn’t, it would have been on the non-window side of my house which meant I would have had to go outside in below freezing temperatures in order to get a peak. So, instead, I took this photo much earlier in the evening from inside my house.
Contrary to intuition, leaving your shutter open longer to photograph the moon is a bad idea. A fast shutter speed and low ISO are key to achieving any kind of detail. I shot this photo (which has been significantly cropped) at 200mm at f/2.8 with an exposure of just 1/2500 of a second.
