Finally caught a break with all the clouds in the sky tonight and was able to get some new moon shots in. The sigma 75-300mm DL is my standard lens for shooting the moon as it's the largest lens I own, but I do like working with it. Well, I've pretty much determined the "sweet spot" aperture for shooting luna using the sigma. That sweet spot is apparently f/16. I took several shots within a 10-15 minute period, making adjustments for the movement of the moon to keep it fairly centered. I used the IR remote on 3s shutter delay to trigger. All of the images had varying ISO and shutter time settings. I took the two images that I considered "best" and resized them, then I went back to the original jpegs and did crops on each. Exif data is available in my gallery on their respective full size display page. No EXIF for the crops.
Here is image #1 with corresponding crop immediately below:
Here is image #2 with corresponding crop immediately following:
As stated above, the sweet spot for this sigma lens seems to be f/16 in this scenario. I have tried higher apertures and lower apertures, but the best quality always seems to be f/16.... at least when zoomed to 300mm @ infinity focus. To make the images even sharper, the only real improvement I can think would be to boost the shutter time a bit more, but then the iso would have to be boosted up even more, and I was trying to keep that below 800. After all of the trial and error shots I've taken of the moon, I would have to say that this is probably about max IQ you can get shooting the moon with this lens with very little room to improve. No post-processing outside of resampling to 25% of original size was done to the images. Crops were taken from the full size camera output jpegs.
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