How to best shoot deep sky in full moonlight.

[cometcatcher]

Rules for living in Mackay. 1) It will be totally overcast during new Moon. 2) If it is ever going to be clear at all it will be during full Moon. :mad2:

So given the above rules, how best to photograph in moonlight?

Some observations... back in the good ol' days when all we had was film, it was near impossible to shoot deep sky in moonlight. The allowance of a single frame would fog long before anything other than stars became visible.

But digital has changed all the rules. Now I see people (myself included) shooting with the big bad in the sky and still getting deep sky images. Is this because of the magic of frame stacking?

What are the rules here? Let's say that during new Moon I can take 10 minute subs before each frame fogs. During full Moon let's say it's 2 minutes before each frame fogs. If the total exposure time is 1 hour for each (6 x 10 no Moon or 30 x 2 full Moon) will the end result be much the same? That doesn't sound right. There has to be a penalty somewhere. Moon or any unwanted light is noise. Help me wrap my head around this one.

[skysurfer]

Huh ? 2 minutes ?? The image will definetely fog. Period. Unless you do narrow-band AP.
Photographing deepsky during a FM night is worse than photographing in downtown Sydney as in the latter case the light pollution is only in limited wavelengths and can be filtered out by Hutech LP or Astronomik CLS filters. That is NOT possible in moonlight as it is just broadband reflected sunlight. So post-processing will NOT help.

Of course there will be clear nights around NM in Qld. Wait a week and it is *really* dark when you drive out of Mackay.

[rat156]

Hi Kevin,

In my experience, either very short subs of bright objects, i.e. Globular or other such clusters, M42 etc. or narrowband.

Murphy predicts that every full moon will be a clear night, so I used to do most of my Ha at that time.

Cheers
Stuart

[cometcatcher]

Thanks. Gives me some options at least.