Urban Astrophotography During Lock-down

The Moon Last night taken with Sony A6500 with 70-300mm lens

Last night I packed the ruck-sack with cameras and tripods and headed out to the local park to take the photo above.

I’ve been doing this on and off during lock-down, for example to take photos and videos of a Starlink train fly over, as blogged previously.

In the early days of lock-down, the rules were enforced vigorously and I mentally rehearsed what I’d say if stopped. “Honestly officer, its work! I’m a writer - look, this is my YA SF book! It’s called Martian Blood and its about Mars! My day job involves satellites too, lots of them!”

Funnily enough, I never rehearsed saying I had to go outside to test my eye sight.

However I was never approached. Indeed the local park in those days was very quiet, a slightly magical patch of darkness and night’s sky in the heart of the great city of London.

But last night things were very different. The park has become the neighbourhood’s pub garden, meeting place for dozens of youngsters tired of only seeing each other via phone screens. I could smell fruity smoke and feel underfoot discarded beer bottle tops.

I set up my tripod, pointed the Sony A6500 with 70-300 at the moon and setup for the shot. I also have a Sony A7iii, but the pixel density of the A6500 is higher so went with that. The 70-300 isn’t that sharp wide open and at the edges, so stopped down to f8 and made sure the moon was centre frame, then manually focused using focus peaking. I find it better to slightly under-expose to ensure capture peaks properly, so was able to get away with ISO100 with 1/250s exposure, 10 second delay to remove tripod vibration.

Then home and quickly load the RAWs into Capture One to have a look, and the above was nearly the last exposure and processed up very nicely.

Like many others, I find the local park is a wonderful resource, an escape during lock-down.