Moon photos - manual focus

[darthraptor82]

Hi everyone.

So i've recently started shooting Moon photos with my Canon 2000D DSLR using a Canon 75-300mm zoom lens, tripod and remote shutter control.

I've tried various combinations of aperture, shutter speed and ISO and the sweet spot recently seems to be ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/80 shutter speed.

I managed to get some fairly decent images but the one thing I'm struggling with is calibrating my manual focus.

All the tutorials say to point the camera at a bright star, use the digital preview screen and zoom in using digital zoom before adjusting the focus ring.

I seem to get almost to the point where it's properly in focus but not quite sharp enough.

I am in North Wales on the coast so I'm aware the temperature is around 5 degrees celsius so perhaps I'm getting some kind of condensation/fogging and need a lens warmer.

Or, I'm just really bad at finding the sweet spot.

Just wondered if anyone has any tips?  Could a bahtinov mask help me manually focus better?

 

Thanks

Rich

[Elp]

That's actually not the best method from my experience. Both lunar and solar and even planets I overexpose the shutter speed so the target is a white disk, then focus until the disc is as small as possible, you will see on larger objects the edge also becomes crisp/sharp and defined (as long as your shutter speed isn't too long), then dial back the shutter speed and very very minutely fine tune for the surface detail which is quite difficult due to atmospheric seeing.

[darthraptor82]

Awesome - thanks, I'll give that a try later!