If you want to snap a photo of the moon in all its glory, be prepared.

Start With the Right Camera and Lens

The moon looks beautiful, big, and bright.

You snap a pic with your phone and take a look.

You might as well have photographed a speck of dust because thats what it looks like.

If youve ever taken a photo of the moon with your phone, you know this feeling.

The biggest and most obvious reason your moon photos suck is that the moon is just so far away.

In basic terms, focal length is the distance between a lens and its focal point.

Most decent photos of the moon are taken withtelephoto lenses with focal lengths of at least 300mm.

The capture in the video above, for example, was taken with a 500mm lens.

By comparison, your phones focal length is probably about 20mm.

Smartphone cameras and point and shoots are designed to be compact and convenient enough to fit in your pocket.

However, there aredetachable smartphone lensesavailable that come with optical zoom.

As you could imagine, those arent that powerful either, but you could getslightly better shotswith them.

They wont be amazing, but theyll be better than what you would get otherwise.

No, Ive seenbrilliant iPhone pics of the moon,you might say.

These cameras are equipped to handle better lenses.

For lunar photography, youll need to rent or buy one of those 300mm or higher lenses we mentioned.

Itll do the job, but its nothing special.

You could use your cameras metering mode for this.

With spot metering, you choose a smaller area.

Its easy to adjust these exposure configs yourself, though.

Heres what each of those three options mean and how you should adjust them to get your moon photo.

Aperture

Aperture is the amount of light your lens lets in and its measured in f-stops.

The wider the aperture, the lower the f-stop (f/1.0 is pretty wide).

Narrower apertures will have a higher number, like f/11.

In fact, f11 is the ideal aperture for moon pictures.

Theres even a name for it in lunar photography: theLooney 11 Rule.

Youll be able to pick up more detail, like craters and shadows.

Well tell you how to fudge this later, though.

The faster the shutter opens and closes, the less light it allows.

When you have a long shutter speed, you let in a lot of light.

Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second.

For the moon, you want a speed around 1/125 to 1/250 second.

The moon is already bright, so you dont need to keep your shutter open that long.

ISO Speed

ISO determines how sensitive your cameras sensor is to incoming light.

The higher the ISO, the more sensitive itll be to light.

The problem is, this typically makes your photo really grainy, too.

These ranges should get you in the ballpark, though.

Focus on the moon, then shoot.

You also want to use a tripod to double-check the image is stable and not blurry.

If its obscured by a bunch of clouds, youre not going to get as good of a shot.

Youve probably seen images where both the moon and its surroundings are exposed beautifully, though.

Thats usually because photographers take two separate photos and merge them.

Photograph it with the silhouette of some trees in the foreground, for example.

Photo credit: Kevin Winter/Getty;Pixabay,John Sullivan