Project Moon

The moon is always fascinating to me. This could be because I saw the moon landing live on TV late at night, although it was bedtime. In addition, a map of the moon with all the names of craters and mares was hanging in my room when I was a teenager. I came back to the topic of moon photography relatively late in my life and it was triggered by the book "Astro-Fotografie - Blick zum Himmel mit der digitalen Kamera" from Roland Störmer (ISBN978-3-8266-9484-4). Armed with a Sigma 150-600 Contemporary and later with a Sigma TC-2001 Teleconverter, I have taken my first pictures of the moon. With this set-up, it is possible to take some nice nearly full format pictures on a Canon EOS 600D or 80D, respectively. Taken a crop factor of 1.6 into account a format equivalent focal length from 960 mm to 1920 mm is possible. The pictures shown here were made with this set-up. It is worth to notice, that the autofocus doesn’t work properly when using the Teleconverter. Thus manual focusing is required. Best results were obtained, when the camera was connected via WiFi to a computer or mobile device running the Canon EOS Utility (80D) or the qDSLR dashboard (600D equipped with a TP-link) software. Because of the high focal length, a continuous centering of the picture is necessary. I consider buying a parallactic mount for alignment.