How to: Shoot the moon (on a phone camera)

Simple enough, you'd think. The moon lights up our skies most nights (cloud and location permitting) and it's always tempting to snap the atmosphere, especially hoping to capture some of the detail that our eyes naturally perceive.

Except that it's almost impossible. While our eyes are incredible at adjusting to different light levels and at resolving detail in a small area, phone cameras not so much. The moon at night is vastly, hugely, brighter than the black scene around it, meaning that focussing on and adjusting exposure for it is tricky indeed. Go on, try it for yourself with your phone's camera.

However, armed with a phone camera with a decent telephoto and some top tips, there's no reason why you can't get close to what I shot here, yesterday on an iPhone 17 Pro Max:

Whereas your first attempts to snap the moon will no doubt have been a small white blob on a vast black background. That's OK, you just need some top tips.

Shoot in the daytime! 

Yes, unintuitive, but the moon can often be seen on clear days, white against a blue sky, as shown below. Not as immediately atmospheric, but if you're after the technical challenge of seeing how much detail your humble smartphone camera can grab, then daytime helps a lot. 

Above is the ideal situation. Unzoomed, it doesn't look like much, but the brighter background means that your phone camera will already be geared to short exposures (e.g. 1/250s).

Zoom - moderately

This is where a good phone telephoto helps, of course. My iPhone 17 Pro Max is as good as it gets, with 4x optical on a 48MP sensor, meaning 'lossless' 8x zoom. Which is a great start, but interpolative zoom algorithms are now pretty good and so you can push a little digital zoom too. In the example on this page, I went to "12x" zoom in the Camera interface, relying on the software to give me a little 'extra' zoom without devolving into silliness.

Settings and exposure

If you have a Pro iPhone (or similar on Android) then seek out a 'Pro' mode (on the iPhone, it's ProRAW), essentially bypassing the natural 'sharpen at capture time algorithms. There's no point in losing image quality right at the start, after all.

You're almost there and ready to snap the shot. Next up is to adjust exposure down all the way. Each phone camera UI will have its own gestures for this - on the iPhone there's a little exposure slider to the right of the focus box and you should swipe down... and down... and down again until it will drop no more. In my experience, the very bottom position is enough to bring out all the moon's detail, but your mileage will vary according to conditions and device.

Snap!

Now take the shot, trying to keep as still as possible, though with a likely shutter speed of 1/250s, stillness is not critical - there's no need for a tripod, which might surprise you for something astrophotographical.

Crop

Having got the shot, even with the zoom, the moon is going to occupy just a small section of the frame, so you might as well crop in a little. A factor of up to four should be enough. Yes, I know you're now only going to have a photo resolution of about 3MP, but that's still enough to fill a 1080p monitor, so don't worry about it. Plus social media 'sharing' resolution is way lower than this.

Sharpen as needed

The moon can now be sharpened a bit - use your phone's built-in photo editing tools to sharpen the image until it looks about right. So neither too vague nor too artificially enhanced. A nice middle ground should work out about right.

Why?

I do realise that the moon is the moon, that it hasn't changed in millennia, and that millions of other people have taken the same shot in the past on cameras of different kinds. So there's no real POINT in snapping the moon. 

Other than as a tech demo and learning exercise, as here. Or just... for fun!