The NL Filter is your friend

I'm not too familiar with Photoshop, never having used it.  I suspect that it has rather more advanced filtering than the Gimp, my usual pixel-editing program.  In any case, for those doing editing work that involves clean-up (as my latest moon shots have required), the NL filter is a huge win for you.  The link has the documentation.

Over-developed Attempts with TC-301

I've made my first attempts with the TC-301.  The results are a bit over-developed, but as a start it's probably not too bad:

400 (800) mm f/5.6 @ f/8(16), 1/100s, ISO 200

Upcoming Celestial Events

There's an annular eclipse coming up in May, and Venus will transit in front of the Sun in June.  The transit in particular is of some interest, since the planet will not make the transit again for over 100 years.  Hopefully I'll be dead when that happens.  While I didn't set out to do astrophotography when I bought my camera, I'm considering picking up a solar filter and a teleconverter (probably a TC-300 to mate to the 400mm—turning it into a 1200mm- f/11-equivalent lens on my d7000) to try to capture both events.  I'll probably do some tests on the Moon if I make the purchases.  I'm also considering extension tubes, which could have some interesting effects on the 400 as well, particularly in macro ranges.

On ND filters

For my birthday last year, I was gifted with an ND grad (.6, i.e., two stops) filter.  I haven't used it very much in regular shooting, but a recent trip out to a local tourist trap provided some opportunities to use it.  I've been trying to refine a raw workflow, but my hardware is limited and it has been a bit of a struggle to produce images in a timely fashion.

Neutral density filters are useful for a variety of scenes.  An ND filter reduces the light hitting the sensor by some amount.  This is helpful for scenes with a wide dynamic range (e.g., a sunset) or when additional motion blur is desired.  In the former case, the filters are usually graduated so that the horizon can be set properly:  above the grade, light is reduced; below the grade it is transmitted without change.  This is the sort of filter I have, but it serves in both capacities because it is large enough to fit over a 52mm lens without touching the grade.

Images with discussion following the jump.

More Moon Work

So I'm still getting started with the raw workflow.  The issues of noise and other artifacts come up pretty often when I'm working on the moon pictures, especially at 400mm.  The 70-300 seems like its not as sharp, but it also handles the noise a lot better.  I don't shoot with it anymore, so there's no definite side-by-side comparison.

I processed another photo today of the moon with RawTherapee, emphasizing better noise reduction (luminance, chrominance, and so on).  Here's the result:

400mm, 1/800s, f/11.0 @ ISO 200

For reference, here's the other processed image; it's a bit sharper, and the exposure compensation is obviously different: