Moon shots

On January 10th, there was a bright moon and a clear sky, so in spite of the fact I had been battling the flu, I was excited to make my first attempt at moon photography.  Side note: getting the actual flu, and not just a virus with similar symptoms, is pretty dang annoying.  I am STILL feeling effects from it and it's been only a few days short of a month.

I don't have a telephoto lens.  Heck, I only have the kit (18-55) lens for my Nikon D3300.  But Marie has a 55-300mm lens that, using a tripod, gets enough definition to allow for a pleasing finished product if you crop the image.  Here are a couple that came out fairly well, plus a composite of some other shots to make a sort of "moon trail."  What I found was that, using this equipment anyway, autofocus got a much crisper result than manual.  The first two below were on auto, and of course using a remote.  The trail was set up with manual focus, and then I waited 2 minutes between remote triggers.  It was fun to track the moon in the sky but you can see how much less definition there is to the surfaces in that one.