A simple moon PowerPoint template and one that was a lot of fun to make.

I took the photo using a Canon EOS300D digital camera. I tried initially to take the picture with a standard lens but the image was too small. A trip down to the camera shop and I was able to pick up a 300mm lens that was not too expensive.

There are two secrets to taking pictures of the moon.

1. A tripod is absolutely essential.

2. You must use a manual exposure. As it is so dark the camera will automatically add in a long exposure of 4 seconds.

Using automatic exposure (above) results in the moon being over exposed.

But when you zoom in the moon is actually very bright. The photo in the templates was taken at 1/160 second with F5.6 at ISO 100.

All moon images need a degree of manipulation to make them work. I used Photoshop to touch up the images. Using the curves settings works better than the levels settings. The sharpen filter produced some good results. I then added a hint of yellow to the image to create some extra depth.