Please Fasten Your Lunar Belts and Check to See That Your Seat Backs Are in the Upright Position

Comments welcome.

 

--Lannie

Amazing to think that we are contemporaries, however briefly. Spectacular shot, Lannie, what's the story behind it.

Why, thank you, Jack. I bought the scope and accessories in spring, 2007 but never got around to using them with a camera. I was going to use the scope for deep space photography, but the equatorial mount and tripod I bought were not really suitable for that. Last week it occurred to me that even an altazimuth mount (which I had on hand) could surely handle a picture of the moon, and so I finally dug into the accessories and found the camera-telescope adapter. That's about it.

 

There is no eyepiece to the scope on shots like this. The objective lens of the telescope (in this case an 80mm f/7.5 lens) is the entire lens (in this case an apochromatic triplet), and, lo, the camera with adapter did give me infinity focus! It was remarkably easy, and I am sure that I can get some better shots.

 

I got my first telescope (a 60mm, 40 power Tasco) in 1958 and saw the rings of Saturn by May of 1959 at the age of fourteen, having learned the constellations when I was eleven. I used to wonder what people got out of amateur photography with telescopes. Now I understand--and want a bigger scope with longer focal length so that I can see even more detail. I never thought that I would be interested in lunar photography, but I think that it could get fairly interesting--although I still would like to get a good mount so that I can take some deep space shots with stacked images on the computer.

 

Seeing Howard Cox's picture of M31 in Andromeda in February, 2006 on this site ( http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=5145424&size=lg ) was the beginning of this particular odyssey. I was astonished that, with stacking, one could capture such detail with an 80mm objective--a very small refractor. If and when I can afford a mount such as Howard uses, I might try some deep space stuff--but that is $3000 plus, way beyond my budget.

 

Thanks for visiting.

 

--Lannie

thanks for the detailed explanation. These are certainly exciting worlds and I hope you can scrape up the $3000 to but your new telescope..

Lannie: Great photo, I too have a telescope, but it stuck in the basement as their are just too many trees and lights in my area. I was wondering where to look to get a camera adaptor to fit my scope. Any advice? Tom

Tom, since I had bought an Orion scope, I went to the Orion site ( http://www.telescope.com/control/main/ ) for adapters, since I wanted to be sure that they would fit the scope that I had.

 

A lot of used things are available in the classified section of Astromart.com ( http://www.astromart.com/classifieds/ ). I am probably not the person to talk to on this, but I suspect that if you wrote PN's own Howard Cox ( http://photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=1525616 ) and others who are accomplished in astro-photography, they could probably give you the kind of specific information that would help in your case.

 

I have to say that, even with all Orion parts, I had to do a bit of trial and error in terms of getting this to work. There is surely a better way.

 

My work is really pretty primitive. If one goes to Wikipedia and looks up "Tycho," one can see a picture of Tycho that is far superior to mine--done by an amateur using an 11-inch reflector.

 

In this photo, the dark crater near the top is Plato and the rather prominent crater near the bottom center is Copernicus. The "sea" between the two is Mare Imbrium. I have seen many pictures of this area which are far superior to this, of course. I believe that I can do better, but I was happy that my first night out with a camera attached to my little telescope yielded something that was at least passable.

 

--Lannie

This is an amazing capture. Your explanation is also very good. Hope to see more exciting shots with your telescope. Best regards.

Thank you, Sumon. The fact is that I needed a longer focal length to get what i wanted, but that would entail purchasing a more powerful telescope. In any case, the image is beginning to break down in terms of resolution. The next click to larger proves it beyond a doubt.

 

Sometimes the glass, not the camera, is simply too limiting. In my opinion, this is one of those cases.

 

It was still a fun thing to try to do.

 

--Lannie

Very impressive, i like the shot and the crop you made.

Just some thoughts from my personal experiences with cameras and lenses. The combination may show the flaws of the lens more, higher pixel density and maybe a less sharp lens. You may get better results at the 5dmkII ( as we clearly have with the 100-400)
Some i noticed myself with apsc in comparison to fullframe is they tend to loose detail fast (get 'muddy') when its less exposed or underexposed. With the 7d for me the real iso is 1/3 to 2/3 higher than given by canon. Expose to the right they call it. Our results got better (less muddy and less grain)  when overexposing. The 7d proved able to correct some overexposure still at these settings, not sure how the 50d does..

There is software that combines multiple shots to 1 higher res image I think you can find a description at digital outback site. Maybe interesting for this kind of shooting :-)

Anyway, its nice to experiment and see how to get best out of it :-)

cheers, hans

Thanks, Hans.  If stacking works with deep space objects, I don't see why it would not work here.  I have never tried it.

As for the crop, it is from a massively resized file.

There is a lot of food for thought here.  Thanks for your time.

--Lannie