The Obligatory Moon Shots with the Nikon P1000

The Nikon P1000 has, I believe, the longest zoom you can buy in a handheld camera. One of the things people like to do with it are these kinds of moon shots — which are impressive, considering that the best shots I’ve ever been able to get of the moon with any of my previous lenses looked something like this. Just a ball of white light, like a ghost.

Nikon is very proud of this feature, and provides a handy automatic setting for taking photos of the moon that bring out the surface details.

You’ve already got a pretty stunning photo at this point, but you still have so much more optic zoom available. It’s really an amazing camera.

At the full zoom of 3000mm (around 125x magnification) you can see colors, craters, and those radial lines formed by the impact of enormous asteroids. It’s a very satisfying camera to use. There’s literally nothing beyond your reach. If you can see it with your naked eye, you can (theoretically) get a nice close-in shot.

The power of the lens is roughly comparable to that of the telescope Galileo used to observe the moons of Jupiter, which would have appeared something like this. The blurriness of the shot illustrates how difficult it is (it was a windy night) to maintain sharp focus at that high a magnification.