Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Panasonic G5 with 100-300 Mega OIS shoots the Moon hand held …

Ahhhh Beelaba Moonaba …

Panasonic G5 + 100-300 Mega OIS  @300mm (EFL 600mm)  160iso  f/5.6  1/25

So hand held at 600mm … neat. Of course, I was asking for more than 4 stops of stabilization and I got most of what I wanted, but the image is still slightly soft, so I am not writing home about it just yet. I need to play with it some more and to try shooting the moon from a tripod with it. Even more fun if I pit it against the Tamron 500mm mirror lens, which in the end was the only lens to survive my purge of Nikon gear.

So anyway … the top right hand sea is Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) and the mountains to the top right of the mare are Montes Caucasus. That’s a pretty good view of them, despite only having 600mm. I quite like how it came out.

Of course, what I would like is to get the whole rig perfectly stabilized and then work on getting a perfect exposure that is slightly over exposed. That reduces noise dramatically and allows me to get a much cleaner 100% crop (which this pretty much is.)

So there you have it … the fun never stops when you have a 2x crop factor Smile

Update: I should probably clarify the conditions of the shooting. The moon was just above the horizon on its way down, so the “seeing” (clarity of the atmosphere) was poor. Further, parts of it were obscured by cloud, another knock against the conditions. All in all, I cannot complain about the result.