Connecting a camera to a telescope ?

I have a Canon 550d (T2i), my Brother-In-Law (Paul) has a telescope - we would like to connect the two togther.

I bought the following:

Hi there. Not familiar with that exact model, but looks like it's a 1.25" focuser? Might get some vignetting in your images. Just something to be aware of.

Not getting enough in-focus is pretty common with reflectors. Common solution is to actually modify the scope by removing the primary mirror and actually chopping off a short length of the end of the tube, then reinstalling the primary. Scary stuff if you're not familiar and comfortable doing DIY stuff, but it's do-able. Careful not to cut too much off, or you'll push the focus point too far up and maybe have trouble focusing eyepieces then. Google around, there'll be heaps of sites with howtos.

My second thought is that you have have too much between your camera and the actual focuser at the moment, based on the above photos. Is that brass ring a part of the focuser? Is the thread on it a T-thread. Maybe that's what the guys from the club were talking about. Have you tried screwing the EOS adapter directly onto that brass thread? Might get the camera closer and give you the best chance of focus without chopping the tube.

One more comment. The mount in that pick looks like an alt-az, not equatorial. You might get some field rotation with longer exposures since that mount doesn't take into account the rotation of the Earth's axis. Could look into equatorial wedges maybe to add to that mount, or maybe a whole equatorial mount. Depends on how serious you are at getting into deep sky imaging.

Thank you Troy for your reply.

Yes, initially we removed all the items marked "Celestron" and screwed the T-Ring onto the brass ring (the silver tube to the left of the brass ring is the focus tube with the gear rack on the opposite side) - this is where we ran out of inward movement.

The brass ring was then unscrewed from the the silver geared tube, but that is a smaller diameter thread to which the T-Ring did not fit.

Oh, yes,it is a 1 1/4" system.

As for modifying the scope - that really is not an option (at the moment).

HOWEVER - having watched this youtube video, I think we have the solution.

The video is worth watching, but the solution (I think) appears at about 5 minutes in - remove the eye cup from a barlow lens and fit the T-Ring to that. Whilst the Barlow lense enlarges the view, it also moves the focus tube out - thus when we fit the camera, we have more inward travel to play with.

I phoned Paul last night and he confirmed that the eye cup of his Barlow lens does indeed unscrew - so we'll get together next weekend and give it another try.

As for the tracking, I'm not sure and I don't think Paul has really set the scope up for prolonged viewing. Scanning through the manual, it does describe the alining procedure. If we can get some images out of this colaboration I'm sure we'll both be happy - as to what we want to acheive after that, I'm not yet sure - We might get further hooked.

I'll of course update this thread with our findings next weekend.

Lawrence

Low-profile adapter might be needed....