Shooting Moon

On the last Full Moon day, I tried my hands on shooting the Moon. Having no access to expensive Astro-photography equipment, I just mounted my Rebel XT with the canon 75-300mm USM on my Hakuba S4500 tripod. I first used the camera to meter the moon, and then scaled it down about 2 f-stops. The moon was still way over-exposed:

Then I started playing around with the aperture and shutter speeds and got some more reasonably decent shots. Check them out in my moon album.

They are not absolutely perfect. But then, I didn't have a L series lens at my disposal. Things learnt:
Good thing:
1. I used a tripod, and used the timer instead of pressing the shutter myself. That saved some camera shake in such long exposures.
Things I missed:
1. Unforgivable. I forgot to set the RAW mode and was shooting JPEG.
2. I should have used MLU (Mirror Lock Up).
While discussing this, someone pointed me to a neat tool named Registax. Check it out. Potentially you can take more than one shots and stack them up to increase sharpness!! Will have to try it sometime.
This is the e-mail I got from Steve Sprengel:

Besides MLU and a more steady tripod configuration, try a little faster
shutter speed, higher f-stop, and STACK 10+ images using Registax so
you'll be able to sharpen things up quite a bit after reducing the noise
via stacking:

http://www.pbase.com/ssprengel/image/39049737


The maximum number of images in the stack will be limited to about two
minutes worth, before the moon has rotated too much for the features to
be aligned between the beginning and the end frames of the sequence.

Keep in mind that the noise is reduced by the squareroot of the number
of images, so to reduce the noise by half you'll have to stack four
images, to reduce it by one fourth you'll have to stack 16.

The other thing to understand that when stacking images of a relatively
large object like the moon, the features will shift with respect to
each other due to atmospheric distortions, so a winter night moon high
in the sky will be much better than a summer night moon low in the sky.

Some interesting info on shooting moon HERE