Photographing the Moon, which is the one that works first time

The Moon is a sunlit rock. It is lit by exactly the same sunlight that lights a landscape on Earth, and it reflects a fraction of it — but the exposure it needs is much closer to a daylight exposure than to a night one.

Point a camera at it on automatic and the meter sees an enormous black frame with a small bright thing in it, and it exposes for the black. The Moon is then overexposed by many stops and records as a featureless white disc. That is the entire explanation for the commonest disappointing result in astrophotography, and the fix is to stop letting the camera meter it.

• Manual exposure, metered off the Moon itself — Switch to manual, take a shot, look at the image and the histogram, and adjust until the bright limb is not clipped. Two or three iterations gets you there and the answer is stable for the rest of the night. There are rules of thumb published for a starting point, and they are a starting point rather than an answer, because the Moon’s brightness varies with its phase and its altitude.
• A short exposure, not a long one — Fast enough to freeze it, because the Moon moves its own diameter in a couple of minutes and long exposures blur it. This is the opposite of everything else in the night sky.
• Low ISO, because you can afford to — You have plenty of light. Nothing here needs the noise.
• Focal length is what decides the picture — At 50mm the Moon is a dot. Detail starts arriving in the hundreds of millimetres and a telescope goes further. This, rather than the camera, is the equipment question.
• A tripod, and something to avoid touching the camera — At long focal lengths the shutter press is enough to shake it. A timer or a remote release. On a mirrored camera, the mirror slap matters too.
• Manual focus, on the terminator, magnified — Autofocus struggles on a bright object in a black field. Focus manually using live view zoomed right in, on the line between light and dark where the shadows are longest and the contrast is highest.

• Not at full moon — This is counter-intuitive and it is the single biggest improvement available. At full moon the Sun is behind you and lights the surface flat-on, so there are no shadows and no relief — the craters vanish. The interesting photographs are taken near first or last quarter.
• Along the terminator — The line dividing lit from unlit is where the Sun is low on the lunar surface and the shadows are longest. Every dramatic photograph of lunar terrain is taken there, and it moves night by night.
• When it is high, not when it is on the horizon — Low down you are looking through a great deal more atmosphere, and the image shimmers and smears. A rising Moon looks magnificent to the eye and photographs softly.
• On a still night — Atmospheric steadiness — seeing — decides how much fine detail is available, and it varies enormously night to night. Clear is not the same as steady; a crisp cold clear night is often turbulent.

A phone will produce a recognisable Moon through a telescope eyepiece and a disappointing one on its own, for the focal length reason above. Phone night modes make it actively worse, because they are designed to gather light over seconds and that is precisely wrong here.

The next step up is not a better camera but a different technique: shooting video and stacking the sharpest frames, which lets you beat the atmosphere by keeping only the moments when it happened to be still. That is the standard route to the very detailed lunar images people are surprised are amateur work, and it uses cheap equipment and free software.

The other direction is composition rather than resolution — the Moon behind a landmark, at a size that only a long lens and a considerable distance can produce. That is a planning problem rather than a technical one, and it is where a lot of lunar photographers end up.