Two unrelated items, joined only by the fact that both involve pointing expensive glass at something a long way off.

The rumors

A refreshed telephoto zoom and a tilt-shift in the RF mount, neither confirmed. The tilt-shift is the interesting one: architectural photographers have been waiting on native optics since the mount launched, and adapting the old EF bodies works but costs you the electronic aperture control on some combinations.

Tycho, at 1200mm

On a clear night in March we took the long zoom, a teleconverter and a sturdy tripod out to a field with no streetlights, and spent three hours photographing a single crater.

What we learned, in case you want to try it:

• The moon is bright. Meter for it as you would a sunlit landscape — around f/11, 1/125, ISO 100. Every automatic mode will overexpose it into a white disc.
• The atmosphere is the limiting factor, not the lens. Shoot a burst of a hundred frames and stack the sharpest ten percent.
• Shoot near the terminator, the line between light and dark. Craters at the terminator throw long shadows and gain enormous relief; the same crater at full moon is flat.

Tycho is 85 kilometers across and 4.8 kilometers deep, and on a good night you can resolve the central peak from a field outside town with equipment you already own for weddings.

Worth doing

Not because the photograph is commercially useful — it is not — but because an evening spent working at the edge of what your gear can resolve teaches you where that edge actually is.