[dmort]

Shot this about a half hour ago out in front of my apt building. A fair amount of light pollution - probably people who live in rural areas would call it heavy light pollution.

My question is can I do much better with this gear? My wife's parents live upstate so the next time I am up there I will give this another try - less light pollution, less pollution in general!

I've got a few others from the evening, maybe another is a tiny bit better but they all came out more or less like this.

Sigma 100-300mm f4 with Tamron Pz-AF MC7 2x TC on my K5. Shot tripod mounted, SR off, Mirror Lock up w/ remote, MF at infinity, center weighted metering, ISO 400, f7.1 (around f15ish w/ the tc?) 1/640
Cropped, converted to black and white, boosted exposure a tiny bit, added contrast, some sharpening, slight noise reduction.

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[interested_observer]

I think that it is an excellent shot. With the shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings, you have room to reduce the ISO to 100, leaving the aperture alone, which would slow down the shutter speed, but it would still be plenty fast enough.

[dmort]

One of the things I want to test is if I can get a sharper image leaving the tc off and then cropping to the equivalent FOV. I'm also considering the sigma 1.4 tc which supposedly doesn't add a lot of image quality drop to the 100-300mm f4.

[baro-nite]

Looking good. I'll be interested to see what you find with your TC vs. cropping experiments. Light pollution is not a big factor when shooting the Moon and brighter planets. I agree with interested_observer that you have room to slow the shutter speed if you wish. Keep in mind that there is less atmosphere to shoot through the higher in the sky you get, and also that different phases of the Moon are worth shooting too, as the shadows (and higher contrast) move along the "terminator", i.e., the line between sunlit and dark.

[Jean Poitiers]

Looks pretty good to me ... J

[Ex Finn.]

Looks good to me too. I usually end up taking tens of shots and try to catch a moment of still air.

[qleak]

great shot! I only hope I can get one this good some day and I've certainly tried

The only thing I would change (and this is perhaps personal taste) is I would make the moon a little bit brighter in post. I've attached a very quick and dirty edit of the color levels for comparison.

Best,

-Q

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[dmort]

I wholeheartedly agree! I had tried this before with the 55-300mm but didn't get anything decent. But... with the recent aquisition of the 100-300 f4 and the tc I already had, shots like this are now much more feasible. I just want a bit more sharpness out of the image. Slightly higher aperature and lower iso and shutter speed mabye...