July Waning Gibbous Moon

As a follow-up to the supermoon shot in my previous post, last night I spent time fine-tuning my technique for shooting the moon with the equipment I described in that post. Here is the result. 

The main difference is that for this shot I added a 2X teleconverter to increase the focal length. A longer focal length results in higher resolution for the subject, in this case, the Moon passing from full phase to gibbous phase. 

The Evostar 72ED has a focal length of 420mm. It's necessary to use the 85% focal reducer/corrector to capture images through it with a camera so that reduces the effective focal length to 357mm; that was what I used for the image in the prior post. Adding the 2X teleconverter increases the effective focal length to 714mm. The resulting higher resolution provides greater detail in this image. 

This photo is the result of stacking the 3 best of 12 shots using PlanetarySystemStacker. I then followed this tutorial to post-process the image in Lightroom Classic. While some of the improvement over the last image is due to the post-processing, I think that overall this is a much better shot thanks to using the teleconverter and spending more time getting as sharp focus as possible. 

Enjoy!