As I mentioned a few months ago, we got a new digital camera for Christmas.  I was curious to see how it would perform taking pictures at night, so I waited until a clear night with a full moon and took a few photos.  Below is a comparison with a picture I took during the lunar eclipse in 2008.

Now, this isn’t exactly a fair comparison. The exposure on the first picture was too long, and it’s grainy because it was using a higher ISO setting. Maybe I’ll try to do a fair comparison sometime, but I doubt I’ll get around to it. I’m not even sure if I can fully specify the settings manually on my old camera.

One thing I don’t understand is why the size of the moon in the two photos is so similar, given that one camera was 4 MP, and the other was 15 MP. If the images are taken with the same focal length, and the moon is 89 pixels wide in an image 2304 pixels wide, then in an image 4752 pixels wide the moon should be 184 pixels wide. But it’s only 112 pixels wide. Now, that would be true if they are the same focal length, but according to the metadata the 4 MP image is 18mm, and the 15MP image is at 55mm, which is more zoomed in, so the moon should be even more than 184 pixels wide.

My best guess as to the reason is that the old camera has a much smaller sensor that records the image, so an 18mm focal length is a much higher zoom. I’ve seen the term “35mm equivalence,” and I’m not 100% clear on what that means, but I think that’s the difference here. The focal length isn’t the only factor to be considered. I think this means that the new camera has a much wider field-of-view than the old one, but I could be wrong about that too. One of these days I might get a decent telephoto lens; I’d definitely get a much larger moon that way.

Before I go, here are two other pictures I took with the new camera the previous night, when it was a little cloudy.

The next one was interesting because I used a long exposure and I was zoomed out, and I got a lens flare from the moon, which I thought was cool.