Lunar Eclipse

[thisbejonas]

OK I am pulling my hair out. Why cant I get a good moon shot. I am using a Canon 40D with Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM and a 2x II extender so I should be getting 200 x 2 x 1.6 crop factor = 64mm so as compared to other pics of the moon I have seen I should have plenty of lense. I am using a tripod and live view to manually focus. I tried shooting with IS turned off and on with no noticable difference. I shot these shot several stops below the metering that the camera wanted because the shots where I used the metering the camera wanted cam out real blurry I thought maybe due to earth rotation but I dont know why for sure. I shot these in raw and bumped the exposure up 2 stops using DPP that came with the camera. Can anyone look at these and tell me what I might be doing wrong? These are cropped of course and there are two more shots I took on my flickr site.

Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.6 sec (3/5)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 400 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire
Orientation: Horizontal (normal)
X-Resolution: 72 dpi
Y-Resolution: 72 dpi
Software: Digital Photo Professional
Date and Time: 2008:02:20 20:53:22
YCbCr Positioning: Centered
Exposure Program: Manual
Date and Time (Original): 2008:02:20 20:53:22
Date and Time (Digitized): 2008:02:20 20:53:22
Shutter Speed: 49152/65536
Sub-Second Time: 00
Sub-Second Time (Original): 00
Sub-Second Time (Digitized): 00
Color Space: sRGB
Focal Plane X-Resolution: 4438.356 dpi
Focal Plane Y-Resolution: 4445.969 dpi
Exposure Mode: Manual
Compression: JPEG
Image Width: 887 pixels
Image Height: 852 pixels

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/thisbejonas/2281169288/" title="Lunar Eclipse by thisbejonas, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2227/2281169288_88527071c1.jpg" width="500" height="480" alt="Lunar Eclipse" /></a>

[Nobie]

I have to ask you this, can you get a sharp focus WITHOUT the 2x TC? I ask because I have the EXACT same problem. I can get sharp focus, but I put on the 2x and can no longer hit infinity focus. It's SO frustrating it's maddening.

[thisbejonas]

Well here is where me being a newbie really comes into play. I am not 100% sure what "infinity" means. I assume it is the sideways "L" and "8" setting on the focus ring. If that is correct then I cant answer your question as what I did was zoom all the way out (200mm) and then adjust my focus through the live view function while I had the lcd screen on 10X magnify. Maybe that is what I am doing wrong? Should I have the focus on infinity then adjust the zoom to get goo focus? I dunno Im lost.

[hpebley3]

Two things come to mind:
1) I think your exposure may be too long and you're not having focus problems but rather subject movement causing the blurriness. You can't rely on the in camera metering for moon shots. Set it to manual. Remember the moon (other than during an eclipse) is in full sun and it's moving really fast, on average about 2,286mph. In that 6/10ths of a second, it's moved almost half a mile on you. So start with "sunny sixteen" f/16 at 1/100th and ISO100 and adjust f-stop from there. If you open up the aperture all the way and still don't have enough light (e.g. during an eclipse) then bump up the ISO, don't lengthen the exposure.

2) Another trick, particularly with long focal lengths, is to go into the custom functions and enable mirror lock-up. Then use either a remote, where you'll need to hit the shutter twice, once to lock-up the mirror and once to release the shutter or use the timer. The firmware changes the timer from 10 seconds normally to 3 seconds when mirror lock-up is enabled. This helps eliminates camera shake both from your hand hitting the shutter button and the mirror movement.

Hope this helps.

[thisbejonas]

What you are saying makes since. The only thing I dont understand is that I had already underexposed the moon in order to try to get a faster shutter speed and alot of the images I got were so underexposed that I could not bring them back up using DPP exposure adjustment since it basically will only let you adjust 2 stops either direction. So if I speed up the shutter even more how do I end up with a visible image? I can see how maybe it woold work on a full moon shot but what about an eclipse. I am going to try this on some regular moon shots since obviously I wont get another chance at the eclipse shot for awhile. Thanks for your input.