I use iso-100, lowest available f-stop (lens wide open) and change the shutter speed until I get a good contrast of light and dark areas in the live view lcd screen. I shoot hand held and raw. This always seems to work for me with every camera and lens. Then I crop in Photoshop and tweak the contrast, shadows and highlights. It seems the longer the focal length the better. The attached was taken with the Coolpix B700. The focal length is listed as 361mm, though with the small sensor the equivalent focal length is 1440mm. Because it's the moon, the small sensor's lack of EQ and color depth doesn't matter. The shot was taken at iso-100, f6.5, 1/500 sec.

I think you points are very good and will be very helpful to many photographers. I would like to add additional comments to the discussion of good moon photography.
I have frequently photographed full moons from my yard in Kent, WA (15 miles from Seattle) and been disappointed in the overall sharpness of the images. (Both with a Canon full frame and 300 mm f2.8 L with 2x TC and more recently an Olympus EM1 MK II and Panasonic 100-400mm lens.

In late September I was in Alaska on a polar bear photography trip and in a stop over in Fairbanks had an opportunity to go about 30 miles outside Fairbanks to shoot Aurora images. The moon was about half full that night and I took a few images of it. I was amazed at how sharp my images were of the moon compared to images shot at home. This leads me to two issues I have not come to a firm conclusion on:

1. Impact of air pollution on sharp moon images
2. Impact of light pollution on sharp moon images.

I think my next step will be to get further outside the city at the next cloudless, full moon and see if light or air pollution are really factors.

Thanks,

Linda,

You've made some great points. Here is an image I made of the blue moon on January 30, 2018 using my D7000 and Nikkor 200-500mm lens. I set it at the full 500mm focal length, even though it might have been a bit sharper if I'd shot at less than the extreme magnification (e.g., 400mm). ISO of 110 was nearly the lowest possible (ISO 100 for that body). F/8 is quite sharp with this lens. At those settings, I needed to add a little exposure compensation for a proper exposure (+1.33 ev). This was an experiment in focus stacking, so I took 8 shots in all. At shutter speed of 1/100, it was possible to take 8 shots with minimal movement of the moon. Using the focus stacking tools in Affinity Photo was quick and easy, aligning the 8 images as layers and combining the eight layers. The result is quite sharp with almost no noise. It also got rid of the light glow around the moon that I believe is caused by the moonlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere. I started with a couple of shots, studied the results, then adjusted my settings until I was pleased with the exposure before taking my 8 shots for stacking. Just an example of what you were discussing. jak

A big plus is a location with dry, clear, air at all levels of the atmosphere. Moisture and atmospheric instability are the biggest detriments to sharpness. Clouds in the area indicate the presence of both moisture and instability. Instability means that the air is "different" at different levels, leading to all sorts of possible distortion from refraction at layer boundaries and other sorts of ugliness. But if it gets too cold, ice crystals, especially at higher levels, can also cause problems for a number of reasons including, yes, diffraction. This can even be visible when a hazy circle is visible around the moon.

One change I made after learning what lunar material really looks like is that I now make images that are significantly darker than the ones I used to make. If you have a chance to see actual lunar material, you will be surprised to find that most of it that has been returned to earth looks surprisingly like an 18% gray card...some of it maybe a stop lighter. It is not white at all. We perceive the moon as nearly white because of its contrast to blue sky when we see it in the daytime or with our eyes dark-adjusted when we see it at night. There is absolutely nothing artistically wrong with portraying the moon this way, but that is not the way it really is. The most accurate images are those that include a lot of medium gray.

And while some may get good results by spot metering the moon, I do not recommend doing that, because the full moon covers an angle of only somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5 degrees. Most really good standalone spot meters cover 1 or 2 degrees, meaning that even they are including a big blob of dark sky when taking a reading. Most in-camera spot meters are even wider than that. Anything short of a 400mm lens on a full frame calera is going to include dark sky even in a spot meter reading.

The moon does move through the sky. It moves about 14.4 degrees per hour (360/25, if you are counting.) That means that it moves its own diameter about every 1.7 - 2.1 minutes. At a shutter speed of 1/100 second, that is about 1/12,000 of its diameter. So if it is filling your eyepiece, that works out to probably half a pixel for a D850. For a more typical framing or smaller sensor, it would be somewhat less. Summary: Use 1/200 or a little faster and don't worry about it too much.