Tonight's moon

[dale65bama]

First was taken just before sunset so there was still some blue sky; of course, when I adjusted for the brightness of the moon, the sky became very dark. The second was about an hour after sunset. Some exposure/contrast adjustment and one pass of very light unsharp mask in PS Elements 5.

These are unresized 800x800 pixel crops from the 5D frame. Lens is a Celestron Onyx 500mm f6.25 OTA.

Tomorrow I am going to tape the contacts in my 2X converter to see if I can make it work.

C&C welcome.

Dale

[AaronA]

Great shots! I prefer the 2nd moon shot.

1st shot a little lower in the horizon making the moon yellowish?

[dale65bama]

For the first shot, the sun was still above the horizon. The warm color is from my postprocessing;I wanted to have the sky at least a little blue, but if it were as light blue as it appeared to the eye, the moon was just blown and almost featureless. I may toy with the color balance to see what works best. I was just trying out the rig on the moon. I use it for birds and other critters. A very high quality supertelephoto at a bargain price. Manual focus, though, and it vignettes some on the 5D but not the 300D.

Dale

[Martin Dixon]

Hi,

I have been messing around with a 1000mm reflecting telescope that someone had thrown in the trash. Getting some results, but tried canon 2x teleconverter and can see it would work through viewfinder, but get err 01. I think this can be solved by "blocking the contacts" - have you tried this and how did you do it? I'd prefer not to do any damage or lose bits into the camera!

Here is 1st attempt (no 2x) I note a) focus - I couldn't focus better than this as reached stop. fixed thus now by moving main mirror slightly. b) chromatic aberration - where would this come from? There are only 2 mirrors (no normal lenses or filters) between moon and sensor.

[Martin Dixon]

3rd mount, now fashioned from a brass eos to 40mm thread adaptor. Applied clear plastic from some packaging using sellotape to cover contacts on 2x converter and voila 2000mm lens. Somewhat murky evening in London but still managed this...

[Celestron]

Nice shots , i like them both !

[Adrena1in]

Applied clear plastic from some packaging using sellotape to cover contacts on 2x converter and voila 2000mm lens.

I was gonna say, that ought to do the trick. I just put some electrical tape over the contacts of my TC in order to use it with a telescope. A good TC is meant to be better than a good Barlow I gather.

I just wish that all my glass was 100% perfect and my conditions were the same, because with all my extenders on my "big" scope I could get a focal length of around 134,400mm!!! ;) That would be f/480 though, so a bit slow!! :D

[Martin Dixon]

I just wish that all my glass was 100% perfect and my conditions were the same, because with all my extenders on my "big" scope I could get a focal length of around 134,400mm!!! ;) That would be f/480 though, so a bit slow!! :D

You should send a photo of that arrangement. I bet you'd have a lot of trouble getting a photo through it! Even 1000mm is quite hard to keep still.

The telescope tripod I have is very flimsy and vibrates. So I place the base of the telescope on the ground (or a bucket!) and use the tripod to support the top only (and attach additional weight to it). Not very stylish but just about works. Focus is pretty tricky, the mechanism id pretty clunky, I use 10x in live view + delay or remote. If you are not too serious you can pick up cheap telescopes for about £80 new (mine is an "aspen").

I hope one day I can transport all this junk to somewhere away from London to get a clear night.

Cheers!