The Moon is in synchronous rotation with the Earth; in other words, it shows always the same fate to the Earth. The dark side of the Moon actually is not dark at all - it receives exactly the same illumination of the other side but, since it is never seen by the Earth, it remained "dark", i.e. unknown, to us until 1960, when it was extensively mapped by the Lunar Orbiter program.

The July 21, 1969, at 02:56 UTC Neil Armstrong (commander of Apollo 11), moved the first steps on a extra- planetary body. The Moon was explored by other Apollo mission in the next years; in December 1972, Eugene Cernan was the last man to visit the Moon.

The photo on the right shows the surface of the Moon, photographed by NASA in the Apollo 17 mission. Not exactly a pretty place - the Moon is an endless desert of grey rocks, characterized by thousands of craters - with a terrestrial telescope, it is possible to observe 30,000 craters, and there are many smaller craters that can not be seen from the Earth. There is no atmosphere and the gravity is one-sixth of the Earth's gravity.

The Setup : Working at 1680mm

It is not enough to have a very long lens to take a good photo of the Moon: you have to solve many issues. Of course, the focal length is important, but you have to be careful with teleconverters: they increase the focal length, but they soften the image and they reduce the brightness of the lens. The 600 f/4 is easily useable with the 1.4x TC, it becomes more difficult with the 2.0x and it is extremely difficult to use with stacked TCs. 

In the Canon 600 f/4 IS review there is a studio test that demonstrates how stacked TCs have the potential to deliver some more detail than the bare 2.0x, but in practice the loss of image quality due to motion blur is often higher than the gain in magnification (remember that with stacked TCs you have to use an aperture of f/16 to get an acceptable image quality). To benefit from stacked teleconverters, you have to mount the lens on a rock solid support: for my photos, I used the Gitzo 1548 CF tripod with Wimberley WH-200 head. Of course, the image stabilization is active (Mode 1), and I use mirror lock up and self timer (or remote release). Placing a secondary support under the camera helps to eliminate the vibrations.

The shutter speed and ISO are another fundamental variable. With fast shutter speeds it is easier to avoid motion blur; on the other hand, if you raise too much the ISO sensitivity you get noisier images, that can not be sharpened as much as low-ISO photos. For my Moon shots, I used an ISO sensitivities of 200 and 400 to get a shutter speeds of at least 1/40. This SS is enough to avoid the blur caused the terrestrial rotation, but it is still very easy to get blur due to camera vibrations: you have to take many photos to be sure to get at least one sharp image.

The RAW files had been converted with Adobe Camera RAW and post-processed with Photoshop CS2; I used the Smart Sharpen to extract the maximum amount of detail.