Which Nikon lens do I use to get great picutes of the moon?

Which Nikon lens do I use to get great picutes of the moon?

You can use a 300mm Zoom lens, but to get real detail of craters and ridges you'll need longer focal length… At least twice as long. Many use telescopes with camera attached.

The longest, sharpest telephoto lens you can get your hands on. They don't come cheap.

Depends on how much you're willing to spend. Getting the moon to fill even a fraction of the frame requires 400mm or longer, and that gets spendy - at least $2000.

A cheaper option, but a small hit on image quality would be to get a 300mm lens (the latest 70-300mm G AF-S lens) which will run around $550. Add to that a 2x teleconverter, which will run around $350. If budget's a concern, I suggest the Kenko teleplus DG line of teleconverters. The quality is at par with the name brand teleconverters for a fraction of the price in my opinion. For best quality shoot the moon at mid apertures - f8.0 to f11.0.

Have fun

None.
You could spend $3000 on a Nikon 300mm f/4 lens, and not get photos of the moon anywhere near as good as you can get with a $200 telescope.

You need *focal length* to get good pictures of the moon -- with a typical DX Nikon DSLR, what you really want is a focal length of about 1200mm. A camera lens that long, if you could even find one, would be expensive and unwieldy -- while an inexpensive reflector telescope of that focal length will have better optical quality and be easier to handle.

Here's a shot of the moon I took with a Canon XTi, and a $250 reflector telescope:

That's better than anything you'll get with any camera lens.

Look up "Newtonian reflector telescope" for more options.

Other than a solid tripod, you need a really long
that was made using a 4000 mm length

You could drop 13000$ on an 800mm f5.6 lens like this:
(borrowed lens)

To get a picture like this:
(shot I did with it)

Or you could drop 300$ on a telescope and adapter and get images like these:
(Not one of mine)

I would use a representative selection of Nikon lenses to get great pictures of the moon. But to be on the sensible side restrict the lenses I used to a wide angle lens, normal lens, short telephoto, medium telephoto and super telephoto lenses.

Super wide angle lenses are not on my list simply because while you can use it to photograph interesting foregrounds with the moon way out there, the moon would be such a tiny dot it would not appear interesting.

I would use the wide angle lens the same way as the super wide angle lens but at least the moon would appear somewhat larger in the background. Using a normal focal length lens would have to be used the same way as the wide angle lens simply because the moon would still appear as a smallish dot of an area.

Now beginning with the short telephoto lens and the medium telephoto lenses, we'd have to be more picky in choosing what we put in the foreground to include with the moon simply because of the reduced angle of view and the magnification the moon has now. In other words we would have to be more artistic in our placement of foreground and background.

Now if you just wanted to fill the camera viewfinder or back view screen with the moon, we'd have to settle for the use of a very long telephoto lens, the cost of which you can settle for yourself. Plus maybe a couple additional pieces of equipment such as a tripod and a shutter release cable.

I'll leave you the focal lengths of these lenses out of this piece so as to force you to go to a serious camera shop to handle, view and gasp as the features of Nikon equipment as well as their prices!