Metropolitan Moon imaging

The bright Moon cuts through skyglow, making it a great target for urban astrophotography

A lens with a long focal length can make the Moon appear large as it rises over a city, like in this view of London’s skyline

NIGHTSCAPES

Dramatic city horizons and striking buildings make for great foregrounds in nightscape photos containing the Moon. What’s more, this kind of image – perhaps showing a Moonrise, lunar halo or total lunar eclipse – can be achieved with just a smartphone camera.

With a basic DSLR or bridge camera and a longer lens you’ll be able to push things further, capturing more detail on the lunar disc. Very long focal-length lenses – above, say, 300mm – can allow you to get an eye-catching compressed depth-offield effect, making a full Moon appear huge as it rises up over a distant urban skyline.

By using a high frame rate camera combined with a telescope and laptop you can obtain stunning images of the lunar surface

IMAGING WITH A HIGH FRAME RATE CAMERA

Lunar imaging with a high frame rate device, like a webcam or a dedicated astronomical camera, can be a hugely rewarding pastime and is one of the few types of astrophotography that can be carried out without any substantial loss in quality due to skyglow. To do it you’ll need a small telescope, a camera and a laptop to receive the data. High frame rate imaging works by the camera taking a video of the view through the telescope. Software like the free RegiStax then selects the best frames to stack into one image that is then sharpened and processed further. The results are far superior to what you can achieve with a single shot, from something like a DSLR.

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