The recent Super Blue Moon was an opportunity to get out and do some Lunar photography. The moon always looks especially large when near the horizon and despite this being an optical illusion it is a lovely time to be out and watching as a full moon rises. Being low in the sky the light is travelling through a lot of atmosphere so gives a lovely warm colour as shown in the top image with a stilt in the reflection.
It is however not a good time to try to take detailed images of the moon as the thick atmosphere causes a lot of distortion. Waiting until later in the evening with the clear cold sky we had on the day gave a great opportunity for some telephoto close-up images. First thoughts may be that photographing at night with a telephoto you must need a tripod. The fact of the situation though is that the moon is in full sunlight so it is no different than shooting during the day. I have had excellent result with the Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S hand held in the past so made a series of images with the lens including using the 1.4x and 2x teleconverters. These following images are all the full frame captures.
My plan by shooting with lens and teleconverters was to see which option gave the better details – shooting the lens naked and cropping or using the TC to fill the frame. To my eye the performance with the teleconverters is stunning. Stopped down to f16 and handheld I had image after image completely sharp with amazing detail so am completely happy to use the 2x TC to get as many pixels onto the moon as possible. Web display just doesn’t do justice to the detail visible in the full res images.
This final image is a 100% crop showing crisp detail of craters.
The ability to get repeated sharp shots while handholding a 1600mm equivalent telephoto lens is incredible. The combination of lens VR with IBIS in the Nikon Z9 is fantastic. Finding the moon initially it swims a little in the viewfinder but once focus and VR is engaged the view stabilises solidly and allows repeated sharp images to be captured. When using a tripod the the rate at which the moon moves across the sky requires reframing and locking down between shots and tracking handheld is much simpler and more efficient.
Photos with Nikon Z9. Moonrise photo with Nikkor Z 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 VR S, remainder with Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S
