How to Photograph the Moon

Photographing the moon is one of the few things that end up being fairly difficult on a mobile phone. It is not impossible but will likely require the addition of a set of conditions to be in place and the moon to be fairly large from your viewpoint. If you are not able to photograph the moon and only have your phone, still attempt to photo graph the moonlight reflecting off various surfaces. If you want to put your best foot forward on capturing the moon, try to zoom in as much as possible and underexpose the image so that the brightest part of the moon is correctly exposed. If there is a super moon or it appears to be very large, try to capture it anyway.

This post will focus on using a mirrorless camera but the process will be the same with a Digital SLR.

Tools needed:

• Mirrorless or DSLR Camera

• Telephoto Lens (focal length dependent on the size of the moon at your location)

• View of the moon

The images in this post were captured with an adapted Canon 135mm f/2 L lens mounted to a Fujifilm X-Pro2. This resulted in a equivalent focal length of ~ 202mm in full frame terms,

Step 1: Zoom in as much as possible to capture the best composition

The lens I used was a prime lens so I only had that one focal range. The image below shows the what was captured.

Field of view from a 135mm lens on a 1.5x crop APS-C camera, Fujifilm X-Pro2, Canon 135mm f/2 @ f/2, ISO 200, 1/500 s

If you were wondering what things looked like from my cell phone, I did try to capture it. This shot could have been improved by underexposing as much as possible, possibly using an App such as ProCam or Halide to control the ISO and keep it low to avoid the numerous artifacts. The moon would still be much smaller. The regular lens on an iPhone X is only 28mm and the telephoto lens is only 52mm in equivalent full frame terms.

iPhone X standard lens

The image captured with the mirrorless camera could be further cropped within limits.

The same image from the Fujifilm X-Pro2 with Canon 135mm lens cropped in a little

This is the maximum crop possible maintaining a width of 1500 pixels. Capturing the image like without cropping would result in a much sharper image but would require a much longer focal length, possibly in the 300mm to 400mm range. I settled on the first image in the post as a balance between sharpness and have a fairly large view of the moon.

Step 2: Use a fast shutter speed or a tripod

Using a fast shutter speed is highly recommended to prevent the image from being blurred. While you can use a tripod, the shutter speed should not be too low as the moon and earth are moving very slowly. Some experimentation may be needed to determine how low you could go on a tripod without having the moon begin to blur. When exposing for the moon, try to ensure there are no blown highlights in the image.

While the image was taken with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second, a lower shutter speed could possible be used depending on how steady your hand is. I would try to keep the shutter speed above the focal range in full frame terms. This lens is approximately 202.5mm in full frame terms so I would try to keep it above 1/250th of a second at a minimum.

Step 3: Manual focus if needed

You can also try to capture the moon in better light as I did in the shot below. This is often visible during dawn or dusk but sometimes during the day as well if the conditions are right. The shot below was slightly out of focus but did appear in focus on the back of the camera. This will depend on your camera and lens. Using a native Fujifilm lens may have resulted in a in focus shot.

Fujifilm X-Pro2, adapted Canon 135mm f2 @ f/4, ISO 200, 135mm

Really cropping in on the image above shows how out of focus the shot is. This is the same camera and lens that captured the night images above but with manual focusing only.

Step 3: Maximize Image Quality by using the lowest ISO and shooting in RAW

If the conditions are right and you expose correctly in camera, you can get away with taking the image in a JPEG format and higher end cameras have very good high ISO performance. The image below shows what was captured with the iPhone X telephoto camera (52mm equivalent)

Not much detail in the moon itself and it is still fairly small and this image is already cropped in a bit.

Cropping in more shows just how much the image has fallen apart. Capturing this in RAW and forcing the lowest possible ISO even on the iPhone might have allowed some retention of detail in moon even if we are not able to get a large view of it.

Thanks for reading. There may be other options such as 3rd party phone lens attachments but feel free to leave a comment and let me know if there are any other techniques that could allow you to capture the moon on a cell phone.