GX7 - Lens for taking photos of the Moon

I am looking to take photos of the Moon, I have a few lenses:

Panasonic 14-43mm, 45-200mm and 100-300mm but I want to be able to take closer photos to enable me to see the surface in greater detail.

I was looking at something greater than 500mm or thinking is there a 2.0x teleconverter that would work with my current lenses?

I am new to this and would like to know your thoughts.

D

I rented the Panasonic 100-400 to test drive and that was quite nice. I don't know if it will work with any teleconverter though.

The Olympus 300 F4 can be used with the Olympus 1.4 TC.

A friend of mine was able to borrow one from Olympus (through a local camera store) and use just the 300 F4 for the moon and got fairly nice results.

Of course, with an adapter, you can use all sorts of lenses on the GX7.

How detailed do you want to get?

This is taken with a 555mm f/7 lens - I find this pretty good detail, but it's nothing compared to what the real experts do.

If you'd use a much longer lens (telescope) on a tracking mount, that's a whole different level of detail.

Be aware that once you have a few dozen of images like the above, there's really nothing much more to photograph. You could instead try to image the Moon in its surroundings, which doesn't require a lot of detail and can be done with mainstream camera lenses. No need for a telescope or super-telelens if you find interesting compositions.

Dykie2000 wrote:

I am looking to take photos of the Moon, I have a few lenses:

Panasonic 14-43mm, 45-200mm and 100-300mm but I want to be able to take closer photos to enable me to see the surface in greater detail.

I was looking at something greater than 500mm or thinking is there a 2.0x teleconverter that would work with my current lenses?

I am new to this and would like to know your thoughts.

D

OR you can get used one of the "cheap" super zoom compacts such as the Panasonic FZ80 or Nikon B600/700/900/1000 or maybe even the TZ70-90 series. They all have small sensors with very long lenses which however can shoot very good moon shots.

A catadioptric telescope will be cheap and will give you very long focal length. They are usually quite slow, so you're going to be in diffraction territory. But you will not get anything like that with a regular photo lens. Not at a reasonable price. Also, you can use a Barlow lens with a telescope to increase its focal length (it's basically a teleconverter for telescopes). So a 2600mm will cost like $400 or so. But you'd have to read up on Mooon imaging techniques to get anything useful out of that.

TS Optics makes a "lens version" of such a telescope. A 1000mm f/10. If not for its unwieldy weight of 2.3 kg, I'd have already gave it a try.

Anyway, here's example from my SkyWatcher Mak102 with a focal reducer (around 900mm). At it's original 1300mm, it's not possible to fill full moon in the frame.

There's more Moon shots in my flickr album .

This is with an E-M5 (16mp sensor) via a Nikkor 400/3.5 lens and its matched 2x TC, for a combined focal length of 800mm. Uncropped.

E-M5, Nikkor 400/3.5 & 2x TC @ ~f/11 (effective).

-Dave-

Handheld with the GX85 and Olympus 75-300. However, the GX7 may not do as well as this under the same conditions because it has an AA filter and it doesn't have the new shutter mechanism that reduces vibrations.

Dykie2000 wrote:

I am looking to take photos of the Moon, I have a few lenses:

Panasonic 14-43mm, 45-200mm and 100-300mm but I want to be able to take closer photos to enable me to see the surface in greater detail.

I was looking at something greater than 500mm or thinking is there a 2.0x teleconverter that would work with my current lenses?

I am new to this and would like to know your thoughts.

D

Some MFT cameras have a 2x and 4x digital video zoom. I use it and the 100-300 for the moon. Pressing the shutter get a JPG of the shot cropped in. The resolution is a standard JPG, and the images are pretty decent at 4x.

moon shot