Taking pictures of the Moon and bright planets isn’t as difficult as you may think. Although you won’t produce images as spectacular as the Hubble Space Telescope, with a little practice, patience and the right equipment, you’ll be snapping portraits of lunar craters and the rings of Saturn in no time at all. To shoot the Moon, for instance, you’ll need a small telescope of between four and six inches aperture. You’ll also need a DSLR camera and an adaptor to fix it to the telescope where the eyepiece would normally go. You can use the screen on the back of the camera to check you have the object in focus. Because the Moon moves quite fast across the sky, you’ll find it keeps moving out of the field of view. If you have a motorised telescope you can track it, otherwise you’ll keep having to make adjustments.
As far as camera settings go, because the Moon is so bright you’ll only need to use an ISO setting of around 300. Experiment with the length of exposure to see what works best for you and your camera, checking your results and adjusting as you go. Don’t expose the camera for too long or you’ll overexpose the brightest parts of the Moon. While DSLRs are ideal for imaging the Moon, webcams and CCDs are better for photographing the planets, as these are much smaller in the sky and not as bright.