With my eyes I can see craters and the darker patches clearly. My phone shows a featureless white disc every single time, even though the phone camera is genuinely good at everything else. Zooming in just makes a bigger blob. I am not expecting a telescope photo, I just want to understand what the camera is doing wrong that my eyes are doing right.
One extra reason your eyes win: dynamic range and adaptation. Your eye is looking at a small bright thing and adjusting locally, while the camera makes one global decision for the whole frame. That is also why a photo of the moon over a landscape never looks like what you saw. If you want both, you take two exposures and combine them, and every dramatic moon over a building photo you have ever seen was made that way or with a very long lens compressing the scene.
Worth knowing that some phones now have a dedicated moon mode that recognises the shape and does heavy processing to add texture. If yours has that, the result is somewhere between a photo and an illustration. Nothing wrong with it, but if you want an honest photograph, turn that off and expose manually.
This is worth checking before anyone concludes their phone is magic and their friend's is broken. Two phones can be doing very different amounts of invention on the same subject.
Practical timing note: shoot a couple of days either side of full rather than at full. At full moon the sun is behind you and the surface has almost no shadows, so even a correct exposure looks flat. A day or two off gives you a shadow line along the terminator and the craters actually look three dimensional.
If you get bitten by this, a cheap pair of binoculars held against the phone lens gets shockingly good results. It takes about twenty frustrating attempts to line up, and then you have craters.
@gradschool_gary · 9mo ago · 3 replies
It is exposure, not resolution. The moon is a sunlit rock. It is being lit by exactly the same sunlight that lights your street at noon, so the correct exposure for it is roughly the daylight rule, something like f/11 at 1/125 second at ISO 100.
Your phone sees a frame that is 99 percent black sky, decides the scene is very dark, and opens up by six or eight stops. The moon is then massively overexposed and clips to pure white. Your eyes do the equivalent of local metering, which is why you see detail and the phone does not.
The fix on any modern phone: tap on the moon to focus, then drag the little exposure slider down, usually a long way down, until the disc stops glowing and you start seeing grey patches. On most phones that is between two and four stops of negative compensation. If you have a pro or manual mode, set ISO 100 and shutter around 1/125 and you will get craters immediately.
Use the optical telephoto lens if the phone has one, and stop before digital zoom takes over, because past that point you are just enlarging pixels.
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@bevel_bea · 9mo ago
The daylight framing is what finally made this stick for me. Once you accept that you are photographing a sunlit landscape a long way away, the exposure stops feeling like a trick.
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@notetaking_ivo · 9mo ago
Brace the phone on a wall or a car roof even at 1/125. At full zoom, hand shake blurs the detail you just fought to expose correctly, and it looks like softness rather than shake, so you blame the lens.
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