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Comment by karlperera | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this after getting frustrated with overly technical moon photography guides that assume you need expensive setups. The Canon 60D I mention is actually from 2010 and still produces sharp lunar shots.

What's been your experience with budget gear vs expensive setups for lunar photography?

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My daughter is just getting into photography, and I was hoping your guide would share more of how to set the exposure for moon shots (which can be tricky and unintuitive for beginners). You might want to add some examples and what your settings were, as well as how you derived those settings.

It's really just trial and error. Set ISO to ~800, open the lens all the way, and fiddle with shutter speed to dial it in. Shutter speed is dependent on your zoom. If you're using a wide angle lens to catch the whole sky, you'll get ~10 sec of exposure before you start to see trails, it you're zoomed in, it may be as low as a half second. If you've dialed in the shutter speed to not get trails and the moon is too bright, lower the ISO. Just take a few test shots, dial it in, and then take 3-5 shots in succession and stack them in software.

I assume it depends on the amount of detail you're expecting to get.

Generally there are some broad categories:

1) tracked vs untracked mounts

2) shooting single frames vs shooting with high FPS and processing that into a resulting image.

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