If you look closely, you can see cratering at the terminator. But IMHO, the best part of this shot is how the crescent is nestled in the distant trees.
Note that autofocus would probably have chosen to make the trees sharp, at the expense of the more distant moon. In order to make sure I was focusing on celestial objects rather than the Oregon deciduous trees, I enlisted the help of Jupiter. It was in the southeast, and became a handy beacon for me to manually focus on "infinity" using diffraction spikes.
"Goodnight, young little Moon! Sleep well!"
3 comments:
It is a beautiful moon indeed. I cannot wait to see those Oregon Trees tomorrow too.
Indeed, the telephoto's depth of field is very shallow when zoomed all the way in at 300mm/480mm. There is a distinction between the focus point for the trees vs. infinity. I'll have to admit though, that it surprised me as well. If I had known, I would have ramped up the ISO to stop down the lens more -- the photo would have looked better with the trees in focus. Oh well; next time I'll know.
Then again, I now realize that it was motion blur. I ran some depth-of-field tests tonight. After focusing on Jupiter and its moons, I re-shot the same trees in this posting's Crescent Moon shot. This time, there was no wind -- in contrast to August 4th when there was noticeable wind. And, the quiescent scene rewarded me with in-focus leaves on the distant trees. I should have realized that a 1/4 second exposure would blur those leaves, when they were moving in the wind. Oh well. Let's see; what's the emoticon for "embarrassed?" :-]
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