As hobbies go, astrophotography has murderously high barriers to entry in terms of equipment costs and skill, and the money and time required to acquire each. Fortunately there’s an exception. Taking pictures of the Moon requires neither specialized equipment or skill: my first photo of the Moon was taken with an entry-level digital SLR and a telephoto zoom lens, and people have used smartphones to take decent photos of the Moon through the eyepiece of a telescope.
From that first shot I graduated to prime focus lunar photography, using adapters to connect my SLR to a telescope, making that telescope essentially a gigantic telephoto lens. Here’s an album of those prime focus photos.
But those aren’t the only ways to shoot the Moon, as Nicolas Dupont-Bloch demonstrates in his magisterial new book out this week from Cambridge University Press, which is coincidentally called Shoot the Moon: A Complete Guide to Lunar Imaging.
Let me say at the outset that beginners should stay as far away from this book as possible (they should start with the advice in The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide). This is a comprehensive reference that covers every available way for amateurs to capture lunar imagery with their own equipment, and it does so in a systematic fashion. In method it’s not at all dissimilar from Michael Covington’s Digital SLR Astrophotography (from the same publisher), but for some reason I found the Covington easier to follow than the Dupont-Bloch.
