Why is it so hard to get a good picture of the moon on an something like an iPhone

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Why is it so hard to get a good picture of the moon on an something like an iPhone

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mostly it’s the focal length. To a 20-30mm lens that average phones have, the moon is very tiny. This causes a few issues

The rest of the photo is basically pure black so the moon generally gets greatly overexposed and appears a bright white blob

Focus doesn’t work very well because the moon is so small

Put together, you get an out of focus, greatly overexposed moon that looks like garbage.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The moon is actually quite small in the sky. Your eyes deceive you because you are very good at focusing on small things. And you automatically factor inn distance when estimating the size of something. So when you look at the moon with your own eyes you see a giant orb in lots of detail. However a camera is more objective as it does not have smart context interpreting logic to manipulate the image for you like your brain.

Anonymous 0 Comments

1) The moon is very small in the sky (despite how it looks to your eye, which is an optical illusion) and so the wide focal length of the iPhone camera can’t fill the frame with it. When you’re zooming in on an iPhone, you’re only getting “digital zoom” which is just cropping into the image after the fact, so your results get very fuzzy and low resolution very quickly. The iPhone lens’s focal length is around 35mm (full frame equivalent) and to get a photo with the moon filling the frame, you would need something like 1500 to 2000mm.

2) The exposure of the moon in the night sky is hard for your phone to capture. Your phone uses auto-exposure to get a correctly exposed photo of any given scene. There’s math in the system that tells the camera what the average “correct” exposure is, which means that in a dark room, it adds exposure time to capture more light to brighten it up, and in a bright environment, it will use a shorter exposure time to keep from over-exposing.

When pointed at the night sky, the sensor reads that 95% of the frame is black sky (under exposed) so it tries to work to let in a lot more light to brighten that up to what it thinks would be correct. But the moon is in daylight, so it gets blown out to pure white pretty much instantly.

These together leave you with a small white spot in your shot.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because instead of looking at the moon with a telescope, you’re looking at it with a microscope.