Photographing a full moon with clouds on a Nikon D850

A full moon the other night gave me the opportunity to try out the high resolution capabilities of the new Nikon D850.  Just to make it interesting, there were some clouds in the sky adding a moody look to the scene. Getting a straight shot of the moon was easy, but adding the cloud layer necessitated some Photoshop post-processing.

The moon is a very bright object because it is lit directly from the sun.  I varied my ISO from 64-400 to achieve a high enough shutter speed not to blur the moon. I was using a Nikon 80-400mm zoom with a 1.7x telextender. Not only does this magnify the size of the moon, it also magnifies the motion blur.  The moon is moving much faster than you might imagine, and, since I was not using any tracking devices, it takes somewhere between 1/125 and 1/500 sec. to get a sharp image at the magnification I was using. 

Photographing the night sky with clouds is a completely different exposure extreme. In the photo below at an ISO of 64, a focal length of 400mm, and an aperture of f/5.6 I needed a shutter speed of 1/250 to stop the motion of the moon but a full second to record the clouds in the sky. This meant taking two photos is quick succession, one exposed for the moon and the other exposed for the sky.  Later the two were combined as stacked layers in Photoshop. I used a layer mask to paint the moon as an overlay onto the cloud scene.