Stargazing Did You Guide Your Moon Shot?

[check]

Well since I suggested the thread…
Here’s a crop from my very first astro-pic. It’s not super sharp or of great magnification, but I was pretty happy with my first attempt.

This is a photo of the Moon, southern portion. It shows Crater Calvius near the centre, and Crater Tycho near the top.

Enjoy.

 

[Phobos]

Thanks check. What equipment/settings did you use?

 

[turbo]

Here is a picture of the Orion Nebula (always a favorite) that I took through my 6" Astro-Physics refractor about 15 years ago. I used an OM-1 camera body at prime focus (mirror locked up) loaded with Konica ASA 3200 (grainy, but fast) and a 20-minute exposure.

To digitize the picture, I imaged the 5x7 print with a digital camera. Then I applied unsharp masking in Photoshop to bring our the detail in the nebula. If I ever move back out to the country (dark skies) I will build a roll-off roof observatory and buy a CCD camera for my scope. Those cameras are expensive, but the costs of film, development, and printing for conventional photography mount up really fast!

Due to the size constraints (50K) imposed by the BBS, I had to crop the images and reduce their resolutions substantially, but you get the idea...

 

[check]

I used a very simple set-up. An Orbiter 3200 reflector telescope, 76mm mirror 700mm focal length, 20mm eyepiece.

The photograph was taken using the afocal projection technique (camera placed in front of eyepiece). The camera was attached to the telescope with a special clamp. I used a digital camera, 4.0 megapixles, normal settings, fast shutter.



Turbo-1, that's a pretty cool photo.

 

[turbo]

Turbo-1, that's a pretty cool photo.

I'm glad you like it. I've never tried using my digital camera with a telescope - it was hard enough to learn to get acceptable results with film! I will have to make an adapter and try your afocal technique sometime.

Did you guide your moon shot?

 

[check]

Did you guide your moon shot?

Nope. Since it was a regular shutter speed exposure and because the moon is so bright there was no need to guide it.

Be aware though, if you're using the afocal technique with manual focus on your digicam, it's somewhat difficult to get good focus if you're looking at the LCD display. So unless your camera has live video-out where you can connect it to a TV (so you can get a clearer picture of what you’re trying to take a picture of) and adjust your focus that way, or unless your camera's viewfinder displays what’s going through the aperture, it might be tricky to manually focus...and sometimes the auto focus is unreliable.

Edit:

One more thing about digital cameras and astrophotography... Typically digicams either automatically set the shutter speed according to lighting conditions or give you a very limited amount of options. My camera only allows a maximum exposure time of 2 seconds.