Shooting the moon

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I got an interesting camera about two weeks ago, a Panasonic DMC-FZ28.  

It's a full moon tonight, so here's a hand held shot of the moon, curved up a bit in curvemeister and other changes in Photoshop [note: those changes included unsharp masking the image - mgr]. The first image is a fine quality jpeg, the second image was created from a raw file.

Hmmm - the raw image is pretty sweet.  Maybe I'll have to take back some of those things I said about raw images...

(But scroll down to the even cooler pic, done with a 1.5x tele-extender)

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For comparison, here is a daguerreotype of the Moon taken by John William Draper in 1845, follwed by a high quality  image by G. Dal Lago .

[mikemeister_admin]

Very impressive Mike and I've just read the review of that camera - what I dont understand is how you will be able to take those badly exposed pictures, you need for the courses, with such a marvelous camera!
Chris

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It takes that certain touch.  The moon image actually was quite low contrast, and had several areas that needed improvement, including shadow, highlight, and neutral.

[ggroess]

I see you hit the neutrals in the second pass....what no unsharp mask??

;D
Greg

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Yep, I used USM - more on the raw image than the jpg.  The jpg has a tendency to go blocky.

I went back to some of my other images, for which I had both fine jpg and raw examples, and did not see such a dramatic difference.  This image required a fairly severe shadow/highlight adjustment.

[ggroess]

here is an interesting look at a lunar image....

its from spaceweather.com

Greg

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Today I got the last piece of the Deathly Hallows, a step down ring that connects my camera adapter to a Nikon 1.5 telephoto lens. 

My previous attempt at the moon was underexposed by about 2 stops, and I believe this accounts for the superiority of the raw result.  With the "normal" exposure used for this shot, the difference between fine jpg and raw is not significant, so I'm just showing the jpeg.

I used less contrast for this image, to preserve detail along the shadowed area of the moon.

[ggroess]

There is color in there too...very nice...

Use you new found power for good only...else we have to hunt you down....

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Here's another moon shot from tonight - a couple of nights after Halloween.  This time I shot in raw mode, and used a tripod.  I sharpened heavily in Photoshop, radius 1.0 at 500%, and used curves to remove color and bump the contrast.  

Gotta say that raw gives me more control than jpeg, because of the noise reduction the camera does.  The camera will allow me to turn noise reduction off, however, so for me the question of whether there's a discernible difference between jpeg/rap is still unanswered.

Notice that the craters in the lower left are a different distance from the edge of the moon, relative to where they were some months ago.  This is due to nutation - a sideways wobbling of the moon around its axis.

(don't forget to click on the image an extra time to see the full sized version)