Long exposure

Readers and followers of this blog will realise that I have rekindled an old passion of moon photography. Of course, I don't have a telescope or long telephoto lens to do so; only a regular non-professional standard long zoom lens on my rather basic camera. With the little details that I can get through digital photo-manipulation, I'm quite happy and satisfied with all my amaterish efforts.

Back to moon photography, On the night of 26 Jan 2020, I had gone out of the house purposely to take a picture of the new moon. Last night, 27 Jan 2020, I wanted to step out of the house again to take another picture of the moon, now with a slightly more visible crescent, but I was surprised to see it right above my neighbour's house opposite me. Hovering low but still above the roof.

So here it is, the still relatively new moon on the third day (or night) of Chinese New Year. But there was more to last night's photography session. Seeing that I could rest my camera securely on the bonnet of my car, I decided to take longer exposure pictures of the moon. One second, two seconds, four seconds....even up to 10 seconds.

My conclusion was that despite resting the camera on a bean bag to eliminate shaking and using a time delay to trigger the shutter, anything above a four-second exposure was not ideal because of the earth's almost imperceptible movement. The four-second snapshot was satisfactory enough. And as can be seen, they showed up the faint outline of the whole moon: the bright crescent as well as the darker region lit up, I suppose, by earthshine.

27 Jan 2020, 7.44pm, ISO 200, f5.1, 1/40s
(third day of Chinese 1st lunar month)

27 Jan 2020, 7.58pm, ISO 200, f5.6, 2.5s
(third day of Chinese 1st lunar month)