Ok so perhaps NOT, but hey, it got you in this thread
Last night was an awesome moon. So much so I wanted to get out the telescope and see what I could see. Since the moon was so bright I could not see anything else but it. I always wanted to try my hand at astrophotography but never had the equipment to pull it off.
I got to looking in an Orion magazine and saw an adapter that allowed you to “use any camera with any telescope”. Ok, that sounds great so I got to looking close enough at it to realize all it was doing is holding the camera still so that you could focus though the eyepiece. What? That’s it? Ok, so I had to try this out.
I started off with just a tripod and a 75-300mm lens.
That’s ok *ok* but it sure was nothing to write home about.
Since I cant really work the 70-300 up close I decided to fall back on the old favorite 25-80mm
Keep in mind that I did all this while holding the telescope, trying to focus the telescope as well as hold the camera and focus the camera and then clicking the shutter. So yes, for those of you out there, they are blurry
I started off with the lens that is the most easy to use. You all have to forgive me, I don’t know what type of telescope I have, nor do I have a clue what power my lenses are… I just refer to them as low, medium, and “forget it if you think you can focus that” lol
Anyway, low power lens. Very easy b/c there is a lot of glass in the eyepiece so it was pretty easy to pull these off.
Now that I have that out of my system and feeling pretty good I decided to go a little risky, here we switch to medium
WhooHoo not bad if I do say so myself. For those of you that are going O_o what? Let me explain. My telescope has “StarTrac” built into it, but I couldn’t use it. Why? You might ask… simply because the moon is hauling buns across the sky. The StarTrac would follow it, yes, but it doesn’t do me any good b/c I have to follow the eyepiece with my camera while every thing is moving, lol, so they are blurry b/c the moon is moving.
I tried the crazy lens but I couldn’t get a picture, there was simply not enough light coming though the lens to allow for the exposure. As it stands, the above images where black out of the camera, it wasn’t until I took them into photoshop and tweaked the levels did the image actually pop out. I was ticked at first, half of my images where black!! lol, but it worked out.
But wait the is more!
I wanted a better image of the moon. How? Well I switched back to the 75-300 and my low power lens. From there I was able to zoom in on the moon and capture these last few images.
Ok so I couldn’t leave it alone, this is 75-300mm on my medium lens…
I am hoping since I have been able to pull this off that my next task will be to see if I can get a clear picture of Jupiter or Saturn. Both of witch are not as visible this time of year, so that might be a chore.
I hope you Enjoyed!!!
Take a Walk on the Moon
Take a Walk on the Moon
