Shooting the Harvest Moon - Panasonic GX9 with 600mm lens

[Godfrey]

I looked at the Moon. The air was clear, the Moon full. Harvest Moon.

Hmm, last Moon I did was with the Leica 180/4 + 2x telextender. Not quite long enough, had to crop the frame by 50% to get a decent image size. I wonder if that old piece of junk Sigma 600mm would do anything useful...?

Full Moon (Harvest Moon) - Santa Clara 2020
Panasonic GX9 + Sigma 600mm f/8 Mirror Reflex (Nikon F mount)
ISO 200 @ f/8 @ 1/200​

Okay, it worked pretty well. 🙂

That's basically just a square crop on the Micro-FourThirds frame, so the diameter of the Moon with an equivalent FF 1200mm lens is about 6mm on the sensor. Not bad for a lens I paid $85 for about a decade ago!

enjoy! G

 

[charjohncarter]

I tried it last night with a 35mm lens on ff digital. When I major cropped (major) and I blew it up; major pixelation. Your looks good.

 

[Godfrey]

The disc of the Moon at that magnification has to be pretty darn tiny. It's only about 6mm across with a 600mm lens!

With a 35mm lens, assuming your camera has a 24Mpixel sensor, rough calculation would put it that the moon's disk is about 61 pixels across, whereas with the 600mm lens it comes out to be about 1700-1800 pixels across on the GX9 sensor.

(Yeah, certifiable geek ... I love doing the math on these things... 🙂)

G

 

[charjohncarter]

Of course, I wouldn't expect much from a 35mm lens on full frame. But I was surprised how expanding a pinpoint of the total image looked like the moon even with a few edge craters.

 

[Godfrey]

Of course, I wouldn't expect much from a 35mm lens on full frame. But I was surprised how expanding a pinpoint of the total image looked like the moon even with a few edge craters.

That's pretty darn cool! 🙂

G

 

[zuiko85]

The scale is .9 mm diameter for the moon for every 100mm of focal length. So that;
600 mm = 6 x .9 mm or image diameter of 5.4 mm, the height of a 4:3 a sensor is 13mm and it looks like you selected a square aspect ratio for the shot.

Nice shot.

When I look up at the moon my mind drifts to thinking about all the manmade material on it. Six LM descent stages, six crashed ascent stages, several crashed Saturn 3rd stages, 3 rovers, a bunch of crashed Ranger spacecraft, 5 soft landed Surveyor craft etc etc. I've read there is a total of 250K pounds of manmade stuff on the moon.