Astrophotography - the Moon and Jupiter

For the first time in months I got the big telescope out in the back garden and took some pictures, of the Moon and Jupiter. Here's a colour one of the moon:

I did a couple in black & white as well:

They were all taken by connecting the SLR camera directly to the telescope, with no lens in between. The telescope is a Skywatcher newtonian reflector, 200mm diameter and 1000mm focal length. That means it's like connecting a 1000mm F5 lens to the SLR! I actually took about 10 photos and stacked them using Registax to get a sharper image.

I took some more pictures by recording video using my Panasonic FZ8 compact - this is used with an eyepiece in the telescope, allowing you to try different magnifications, but it's a lot harder to focus. The video is again processed using Registax. Here's a close-up of some craters on the moon:

A couple of Jupiter, using different settings in Registax:

and another of Jupiter at a higher magnification, but a bit blurry - the "seeing" wasn't that great, the view was shimmering a lot due to turbulence in the atmosphere:

Anyway, very pleased to get these pics of Jupiter, they're my first. Hope to get some more another time. Finally, here's the SLR camera next to the telescope tube, just for scale:

Mike

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Telescope SLR pictures

A short while ago I posted some pictures of birds taken using a telescope. Well, that was the small telescope, which is 90mm diameter, but has a focal length of 1250mm. This means it acts like an f14 1250mm lens, so with the SLR connected that's about 25x zoom, and that's just too much for the diameter, so the pictures come out dim. So I'd been using our compact camera with that telescope, and got some reasonable pictures.

Today however, I finally got my big telescope out of the loft for the first time since we moved, set it up, corrected the collimation, and took it out in the back garden see how it was with the SLR. Bear in mind this was at 3:50pm, so the light was fading fast, but I managed to get a few pics of starlings in a tree about 50-60m away:

That one's cropped, but here's a full frame, so you can see what's possible:

It works better as it's 200mm diameter, with a focal length of 1000mm, so it gives about 20x zoom and acts like an f5 lens. It's also easier to use the SLR with, as it has a port to connect it directly.

We've also been at the wood, clearing up some last remaining jobs, like this large edge Sycamore:

There's a few awkward Sycamore that we left last year, but now we have a decent winch, we're going to tackle them in the next few days. There's also a couple of Sycamore to come down that we're going to get a friend to fell, as they're bigger than I've trained for. We'll then process them on the ground.

Mike

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