Fly Me To The MoonCopyrighted Digital Photograph

“…and let me play among the stars”. This one is for all the astronauts out there.

Asterisms

Viewing things “out there” that, although at enormously different distances from each other, apparently line up and create an interesting, but false, image is known in astronomy as an asterism. The most famous one is the Plough or Big Dipper (depending on whether you are British or American).

Serendipity and making your own luck

I was photographing in the Place de la Concorde one evening, when I spotted the aircraft heading towards the vicinity of the moon. Equally serendipitously, my camera happened to be set up with a telephoto zoom lens. That said the subjects in the resultant photograph were still much too small in the frame and it required heavy re-processing and cropping to provide this view. Therefore the final JPEG image is a small file of less than 1 megabyte, compared to the original of 14 megabytes, which is too little for a quality print.

I quickly dialled down the Exposure Compensation to -2, in order to avoid the glare of the moon, although – now that I read the metadata – I see that my hurry and impatience made me neglect a few things. Firstly, I did not pull the zoom out to its 300mm maximum. Maybe I can excuse that by the need to seize the rapidly passing moment? Maybe not? You make your own luck, as they say.

Also, because of the lack of time, I did not change from the high-quality ISO of 250, resulting in an undesirably slow speed of 1/100s. This lens is an older, non-vibration  reduction model, so a faster speed would have been ideal, given that both the aircraft and the moon were in movement.

Settings

Camera: Nikon D300

Lens: 70—300mm f4-5.6D

Focal Length: 250mm

Focus Mode: AF-C

Aperture: f/18

Shutter Speed: 1/100s

Auto Focus -Area Mode: Single

Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority

Exposure Compensation : -0.2 EV

Metering: Matrix

ISO Sensitivity: 250

Hand held

In closing, I would just like to remind you that the song is not about astronomy, but about love…

Copyright Paul Grayson 2015