One small step for man…

…  one giant leap for mankind.

40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong spoke those immortal words as he became the first man to step onto the moon.  In a week where space travel has again become mainstream news with the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, and as REM’s “Man on the Moon” is being played on every radio station, I thought I’d join in the hype with this photograph, taken a few years ago in rural Galway.

My first attempt a photographing the moon was during a lunar eclipse a few years back and I failed miserably.  This wasn’t what I had expected, as I thought I had thought about all possible problems that would arise taking the photograph.  It was after all (pardon the pun) a once in a blue moon event.

One important step when photographing the moon like this of course is to use spot metering to ensure that the blackness of space around it doesn’t confuse the camera into overexposing, but also to use exposure compensation to keep the bright moon bright.

To get a good tight shot I used my 70-300mm lens to zoom in on the eclipsed moon as much as I could.  Because it was an eclipse, the moon itself was a dark orange, with not a lot of light coming from it.  Knowing that, because of this, I would need a long exposure I used my tripod and ensured my camera was rock steady so as to not introduce any camera shake which would blur the photograph.  I manually focused the lens and clicked the shutter release.  60 seconds later the shutter closed, and when the picture popped up on the LCD screen I was disappointed to see that my capture of the moon eclipse looked more like a photograph of a german sausage.

While I had accounted for the camera meter getting confused, the moon itself being far away, the lack of light due to it being eclipsed and the need for a steady camera during the long exposure, I had forgotten one thing – the moon is always moving relative to the earth.  And as I discovered, in 60 seconds it moves quite a distance.

Skip forward a couple of years and I’m in Knockbrack in rural Galway and I notice the almost-full moon outside in the sky.  There is no light pollution out in Knockbrack, away from the city lights, and the moon, not in eclipse and low in the sky, is quite bright.  I know this time I need to keep the exposure as short as possible to keep the moon from turning into a sausage again.  I also have the advantage of being able to use my fast 50-150mm lens (instead of my slower 70-300mm lens).  That buys me a couple of stops on the exposure, meaning my shutter speed can fall from 60 seconds towards perhaps 15 seconds.   The moon itself is a brighter, which brings the shutter speed down towards 8 seconds, and I decide to bump the ISO up another notch over the lunar eclipse attempt, which brings me to a 4 second exposure.  The moon will still move in this time, but not noticeably so.

The end result is the photograph you see above.  Not an award winning shot by any means, but at least I had overcome the challenges that defeated me the first time around.