// ENGADGET — MOBILE & WEB
How to use your iPhone to take the best picture of the Moon
With some easy adjustments, you can upgrade your lunar shots.
Trying to snap a picture of the moon with your iPhone can be an exercise in frustration. You frame it up and everything seems fine, but after clicking the shutter, your photo is either a ball of light with no detail or a blurred mess.
So what happened, and what can you do about it? Even with fancy AI algorithms, cameras can't break the laws of physics when shooting a bright object at night. And unlike some devices, iPhone cameras don't resort to trickery when taking lunar snaps, so the photo quality is entirely up to you and how you set the camera. Here's how to do it right.
Everyone wants their moon photos to be sharp and well exposed, showing all the craters and features you see with your naked eye. The challenge is that the Moon is very bright (it's illuminated by the Sun, after all) and the night sky is extremely dark. Your camera's exposure system always tries to average light, so it often overexposes to "brighten" the surrounding sky. As a result, the moon can often become overexposed and look like a textureless circle.
Your moon photos may also be blurry. This happens because when your iPhone tries to boost exposure, it must lower the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second or even lower. As a result, any hand shaking or other movement can blur the image, even with your iPhone's stabilization system.
Finally, you may find that the moon isn't large enough in your shots. The latest iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro models have up to an 8x "optical-quality" zoom and 40x digital zoom, while the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models offer a 5x optical zoom and 25x digital zoom. The iPhone 17 and iPhone 18 standard models have 4x optical and 10x digital zoom. Whatever model you own, zoom in as much as you can so that the moon is clearly visible.
You can get a reasonable moon shot handheld, but your best bet is a tripod. Any cheap one will do, including models like the Amazon Basics 64-inch tripod that includes a smartphone holder. However, I'd recommend spending at least $20 on something higher quality and more adjustable, like the Amazon Basics 50-inch tripod. If you get one like that, you'll also need an inexpensive, tripod-compatible smartphone holder like this one.
If you're having trouble justifying the cost of a tripod, you can also use it for long exposures (to blur waterfalls or create traffic light trails), panoramas, hands-free TikTok-style recordings and video calls. If you really don't want to spend the money, though, you can prop your iPhone against a book or coffee cup, then use the iPhone camera's three-second timer (one of the six-dot menu options) to take the photo. Otherwise, you could jostle your phone when you hit the shutter button and your moon shot will be blurry.
While the recently-launched iPhone 18 Pro's native camera offers manual controls for shutter speed and ISO, older iPhones do not. However, you can adjust two separate exposure settings. The first of those is called exposure and the other is brightness.
To set the first, go to the six-dot menu and tap "Exposure," one of the nine settings on recent iPhones like my 16 Pro Max. Then drag the slider to the right to set it to -2EV, which lets in the least light. This setting will stay through your photo session as long as you don't close the Camera app.