Migrating Moon

So this a photo I took a few days back of the moon. Yes that's right the moon. I'm goign to discuss how I pulled off this shot for those of you still wondering how I did this.

First off you will need the following.
-DSLR
-Zoom Lens
-Tripod
-Clear view of the Moon
-Patience


So The first thing I did for this was adjust my tripod so that the camera was at eye level. Once I had my tripod ready I went ahead and got a view of the moon at full zoom on my lens(which was 55mm) and then another view with my lens at its widest(17mm for me.) Doing this allows me to make sure that the moon will be a constant element in the frame. Once I knew the moon would be a constant I checked out how the landscape looked since I knew it would be visible at 17mm.

At this point I have everything framed up so I lock my tripod in place. Now its time to play with the camera abit. I knew I wanted to make this a 30 second exposure. I set my ISO to 100 to insure a nice crisp photo. Now to select my aperture. For this one i chose to go with f/5.6 mainly because it was the highest aperture I had in the range of my lens, and I knew it would give a fairly sharp photo. I set my lens to 17 for the final framing.

ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture all where set. Now I hit my shutter release and started to count to 20. At 20 I adjusted zoom from 17 all the way to 55 which was done slowly over 5 seconds and with the last 5 seconds the lens sat at 55mm. Now there is a ghost in the image which is something I do often. How that was created will not be discussed.