Filming the moon - is this lens okay?

J

Jean Dantes

Well-known member
Last night there was a really beautiful and large moon, and I wanted to film it with my 7D, however, I was unable to as my most telephoto lens is a 50mm f1.8 (80mm after x1.6 crop). I was thinking about buying this lens:

http://www.dwidigitalcameras.com.au/store/product.asp?idProduct=2649

It's 75mm-300mm F4-5.6 (120mm-480mm after x1.6 crop). I know it wouldn't perform well in lowlight, but since the moon is a rather bright object, would it be okay??

Thanks in advance to any replies :)
 
It will be plenty bright - just used an old Canon push/pull 5.6/100-300mm lens to shoot the moon and it was plenty bright.

Wished it were longer, but hey, for and $80 lens I was happy.

Bottom line is that you may want something longer if you don't want to use the crop mode. 5.6 is plenty fast to shoot a bright moon with the t2/7D cams.
 
Myself i have a Tamron 24-300mm and think its a fine lens for video but remember when you see those great shots of the moon on tv[well i often do]they are using lenses with many times more than 300mm zooms for the close detail they get.
 
On the quite inexpensive side,
you can get a cheaper vintage telephoto lens and a 3x focal multiplier. Well the extra optical element of the multiplier will slightly reduce image quality, but you can get closer shots of the moon without spending a fortune for an 600mm lens that will hardly ever get any other use.
I have shot the attached picture with an old Chinon Auto 200mm f 3.5 (@ f=11 I think) M42 mount and a 3x focal length multiplier on my t2i.
 

Attachments

  • moon.jpg
    moon.jpg
    15.3 KB · Views: 0
I have used the tamron 70-300

for such a cheap lens, it's actually decent... up to 100mm or so; above that, it quickly loses sharpness, and not only in the corners

and, as others have said, 300mm is not a lot if you want to take pictures of the moon

f/5 is more than enough, even if it's far away, the moon is on direct sunlight

I've always wanted to play with something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/25-75x-Telesc...95760281?pt=Camera_Lenses&hash=item4a99135299
(absolutely no idea on how sharp the images coming out of that will be)

if you're still interested on the tamron 70-300, you can check out my resolution tests here:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/lenstests/lenstestsa.html
 
Last edited:
If I remember correctly, the size of the image of the moon is 1mm for every 100mm fl.
So to fill a DX sized sensor you'll need 1600 - 1800mm total.
(And no, "crop factor" doesn't come into it, image scale is image scale).
Dave
 
Regarding Tamron 300mm lenses losing sharpness at the tele end i presume in stills, for video my 24-300 loses no sharpness, we are only talking 2 megapixals for video and if a lens cant resolve that what hope.
 
Thanks so much for all the feed back!

What on Earth are those Bower lenses? I've never seen anything like those before! Is there any test footage online shot with one of these ultra telephoto Bower lenses on an DSLR? F8 should be plenty for shooting the moon too.

Hopefully these Bower lenses are sharp, even at 800mm - I'm sure they will be considering that the video is only 2MP.
 
Yeah, the look and price of the Bower freaked me out a bit...

That's a beautiful shot! I'd love to get that close. I wonder how close 480mm would get me...?
 
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top