cardinal

I bought an apo refractor about a month ago and just got my t-adpater and field flattener in the mail. I have been unable to do any astrophotography with it yet due to cloudy cloudy cloudy weather. It was sunny today and I decided to experiment with it for a bit so I setup the refractor on my tripod using a 26lb ballhead and Pointed through a glass door while sitting on my sofa, watching tv LOL. The sun was going down and I had the rig pointed in an area were I normally see birds in my yard and sure enough this cardinal stopped in for a visit. It was tough getting a sharp focus because without a sturdy and balanced gimbal head the whole setup wobbles like crazy. No autofocus magic with a telescope, you have to zoom in to 10x in live view and back off the focuser until you see a sharp picture which is very difficult when wobbling. the scope has an 80mm objective lens and a focal ratio of f7, so 560mm I believe and on an aps-c 896mm I believe if my math is correct. Next I cropped the picture down by about half. It's certainly not on par with an 800mm f5.6, but definitely has some potential as a bird scope. I had to tweak the image a bit due to exposure and contrast loss from the glass door and lack of metering abilities so feel free to recommend post process techniques.

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IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/70374000@N08/8​526815795/

I think it came out very nice! I used to play around with an Orion 80mm APO and got pretty good results but it was very unwieldy to say the least. lol