Videos of the Moon Without a Telescope

If you want to get up close and personal with the Moon, you need a decent telescope and eyepiece to be able to zoom in to specific lunar features, right?

And then, if you want to do some astrophotography, you need a camera or a webcam.

Lugging a scope around with you can be a bit of a pain when you’re on vacation, but you probably already bring a camera with you when you travel.

The Nikon P900, released late last year, comes with a 24mm to 2000mm zoom lens. Yes, you read that correctly. 2000mm puts it firmly in telescope territory in terms of the magnification it can achieve. In fact, the lens provides 83x magnification.

The video above shows just how capable this camera and lens are. The camera is hand held rather than being mounted on a tripod and the user zooms in from 2m4m where the Moon is a small, overexposed globe in a blue evening sky to the full 2000mm range of the lens which shows lunar features in detail.

Given that this is a hand held camera, it shows that the lens’ image stabilization works very well, especially at the extreme focal setting.

Now you don’t even need a telescope and webcam to shoot close-up videos of the Moon. It can all be done in camera!