Night Sky

I don't often shoot much when the sun goes down but sometimes the mood strikes me. Tonight I noticed that the moon was full and it was rising over a bank of clouds with some interesting color still in the sky. I decided to grab a few shots with my D4, 600VR + 1.4; I mean grab as I did it hand held initially until I decided I had time to set up the tripod. So, getting to the point, even thought I was shooting at a relatively low 400 iso with a good low light camera, f8, 1/1250, -0.7EV compensation I'm not thrilled with the photos. The moon looked pretty well exposed imho, and the sky looked to be close to what my eye saw in terms of brightness. However, I'm seeing a fair bit of blotchiness, noise if you will in the dark sky. I have noticed this phenomena before when shooting dark skies. I would expect noise like that at 4000 iso or more, but why at 400 iso? Heck, I could scan an old Provia 100 slide and have a smoother, richer looking sky. So is it normal to have blotchy, posterized noisy dark sky in digital....do I need to be doing HDR to get decent results, or am I just overexposing? If this is the status quo, how would you folks go about "fixing" the noise (if this is the correct term even) in post? I know that back in the day of the D200 uniform bright blue sky would pose a problem in terms of noise. But this is 2016 and this is a much newer camera, D4. I have attached a heavily cropped section of the original frame for you to view (no post processing done). I view my photos on a 2015 retina iMac, perhaps the high res monitor is making things look worse at my end, my example doesn't look too bad at 800px on one side.   Thanks for taking the time to read all this. 

Even though you have made a shot that ticks all the boxes, the contrast range between the moon and sky is huge, so to get the moon near right (you used -0.7 EV) you collected very few photons from the sky, then you have to translate that to a monitor screen that cannot provide that level of contrast. The moon is in full daylight and the sky is many many stops of brightness lower.

First thing is it looks flat and washed out, a sure sign a levels adjustment will make an improvement, this will set to darkest pixel to full black and brightest to full white. This will make a reasonable shot of the moon against a dark BG. This will also improve contrast on the lunar disc.

If you want the sky as well a second exposure set for the sky will help and blend the two together as a HDR or just blend with layer masks, you may need a couple of steps to avoid the bright light from the over exposed moon bleeding into the surrounding sky areas.

To see what I mean take a reading of a sky at sunset and you might get a reading like 1/8 @ f8, You shot at 1/1250. The moon to get a bright white disc is sunny f22 so 1/400 @ f22 ISO 400 or 1/3200 @ f8. So the "correct" exposure for the sky is about 7 1/2 stops brighter than your exposure. So its is a difficult task to drag it up to match what your eye perceived and also keep the moon exposure looking good.

Correct moon eposure is Sunny f/11 not Sunny f/22 - f/22 would be a stop less exposure than the normal daylight Sunny f/16.  The actual exposure is a stop more light than Sunn f/16.

Back to the photo.  It looks like you were shooting through a lot of atmospheric haze and probably heat haze.  The Earth is radiating the heat that it absorbed during the day.  Take the shot in the early morning hours rather than the late evening hours after the ground has had a chance to cool.  Also it may be that the humidity was high which also results in shooting through a whole lot of atmospheric effects.  Finally, the focus on your set-up may be off just a bit.  You may need to do a precise AF fine tuning at a longer shooting distance.

Yes, brain fade....but the moon itself is still underexposed by 0.7 EV and the sky itself is greatly underexposed as you are shooting a dusk exposure at daylight settings. You are also shooting through maximum atmosphere as the moon is low in the sky, so definitely early morning would be better. The full moon can also look rather flat as there are no shadows to give contrast to help define features on the disc. Astronomers generally prefer to look at the moon in partial phases to see surface detail better.

Thank you for your replies. A lot of dynamic range best handled with HDR apparently. I am always surprised how difficult it actually is to capture with a single shot without a lot of tweaking in photoshop. E.J. I hand held this photo so probably not the best image to show off the sharpness of lens/body. Great suggestion on trying this at dawn rather than dusk.

If you're just looking for sky and moon images rather than earth with moon images. And you're dealing with a full moon, you might consider halfway between sunset and sunrise. (moonrise and moonset). There is much less atmospheric interference directly overhead. After all, if I was looking to take an image of a galaxy or a nebula, I'd want it high in the sky so there would be less atmosphere reducing the light and moving it around.

Tony makes a great point. The closer to straight overhead the moon gets, the less atmosphere you are shooting through.

Looks to me like bad seeing or slightly out of focus... both will lead to nastier dark areas of the image.  I'm not sure where you live Johan, but up here in the NE USA the seeing was terrible during this full moon.  EJ explained well what can cause bad seeing and Tony mentioned that you are shooting through much more atmosphere and you yourself said the moon was rising with some clouds, so tough conditions all around.  

Many people doing lunar, solar or planetary photography will use high frame-rate (video) cameras to take better advantage of bad seeing.  You can take many images, say 500 or 1,000 at fast shutter speeds, and then use software to pick out the best 25 or 30, stack them and end up with a crisp image that you would not easily achieve with a single shot.  Of course you don't need this gear, as many of us have captured amazing detail on the moon with a single shot when the conditions cooperate.

It's amazing how much better the seeing gets after the ground cools and the atmosphere stabilizes.  Waiting just an hour or two can help dramatically, although the moon will not look as huge. (Also, when the sun sets is more important.  If you're shooting a moon rising well after the sun sets it might not be as bad near the horizon, but less atmosphere is generally better)  It's a trade-off!  I generally like to shoot the full moons in my area during the fall and winter when the humidity is low and the air is clear.  

Working with this image, you could mask out the moon and apply a Gaussian Blur or Heavy hand of NR, followed by a sharpening only of the moon to better define the edges and details of the craters and lunar maria.