Telephoto Lens Video Shows Moon Appearing to Move at Rapid Pace

An incredible new video shows a giant moon descending downwards, captured on an ultra-telephoto lens around 10 miles away from a volcano, and has even caught the attention of NASA.

The focal length combined with the distance it was shot from gives the clip a surreal edge, making it look as if the moon is about to collide with the mountain scape, and the audience who are viewing it.

The video was captured by Daniel Lopez, a photographer who primarily specializes in landscapes and time-lapses. The clip was shot using a giant telescopic lens, Canon teleconverters, and a Sony a6300 camera. Lopez caught it from a perch near Tenerife’s Mount Teide volcano.

The telephoto lens dramatically compresses the distance between the foreground (in this case, the mountain) and the background (the moon) — the latter of which is some 240,000 miles away.

According to National Geographic Australia, the explanation behind the moon seemingly moving so rapidly is a result of Earth’s rotation, as opposed to it being down to any kind of time-lapse trickery or video acceleration. The severely amplified compression distance in the video highlights Earth’s spin rate, and accentuates the size of the moon.

See the video featured by NASA. More of Lopez’s work can be found on his website.

Jack Alexander's picture

A 28-year-old self-taught photographer, Jack Alexander specialises in intimate portraits with musicians, actors, and models.

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9 Comments

"The clip was shot using a giant telescopic lens, Canon teleconverters, and a Sony a6300 camera."

So, what lens? A Canon lens, or a third-party lens, or telescope, with a Canon mount? Betwen the lens, teleconverter, and crop factor, what was the focal length equivalent? I'm pegging it around 2000mm.

I wish photo news sites - who should know better - would stop referring to this as shot through a ‘telephoto lens’. It wasn’t. It was shot through a Telelescope. In this case a large aperture APO refractor astrograph manufactured by Takahashi.

C'mon guys... You can't post an article like that at a photography website without talking about the particulars... Lens... Focal length... Etc...

I’m not sure, but it could be a Takahashi TOA-150B F/7.3
Standard focal length is 1100mm
Two Canon extenders (1.4x and 2x) on a crop camera (1.5x) would make it the equivalent FoV of a 4620mm lens (1100 x 1.4 x 2 x 1.5).

Hmm, so I was pretty off in my estimate. I didn't realize he use 2 teleconverters. He had good weather for that then, as the atmospheric distortion isn't too bad.

Peter Lik does not approve this video...

Hehe when Lee just recently posed an article regarding lens compression then here comes one saying"compressed".

You get this same video with a 24mm and cropping!