low tech still gives good results if you know how

[mikestelfox]

just thought I'd share some pictures i have taken recently and show to any newbies(like me )that you don't need expensive components to take pictures the following picture was taken with a 7mp pentax digital camera by simply aiming through the eyepiece.

first i just took a picture and found them to be very blurry and very hard to keep still long enough to take a decent picture

i read a few post were people say they stacked there video shots into an image so i decided to video saturn with my digi cam and got a very wobbly video next i converted the video to avi with a free program i got called video DJ then stacked the images in a program called registax again this was free just type them into google to find the web pages

at first i was apprehensive a my video was not the best quality but the resulting image has spurred me on to try again i hope this encourages beginners that want to try imaging or have tried and gave up due to poor quality

the following image was viewed through a celestron 114eq telescope with 20mm eyepiece giving 50x magnification and is a bad 8 second video stacked in registax

(click to enlarge)

this took my 30 minutes to produce and that includes downloading the 2 programs

good look and happy stargazing :wave:

[jgs001]

Thanks for that. Interesting ideas. I tried some Afocal when I had five minutes with the moon and really struggled. My camera lens is too large and I get some serious vignetting, but that may not matter on something like a planet of the moon. My wife's camera hasn't got enough options, but Vid might work.

[Whippy]

Mike, I'm very much a beginner to imaging and I'm finding the afocal (capturing an image through an eyepiece) and fun and inexpensive way of getting into it. You may find one of these may make your life easier: http://tinyurl.com/2alpqv .

Tony..

[jgs001]

Tony,

Do you have one of those adapters ? Does it only clamp onto the eyepiece ? Does this not put strain on the eyepiece if so ?

[Whippy]

I don't John, purely because I have Baader Hyperion eyepieces and they have a range of step rings. My set up looks like this: http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,20287.0.html . If I didn't have the Hyperions, I'd be using one of those adapters. I'm not 100% certain, but I would imagine the part that probably takes the most stress while imaging afocally would be the focuser as it had to hold the eyepiece, adapter (if any) and the camera. I don't do any imaging with my WO scope as the crayford can't take the weight of all that plus a diagonal!

Tony..

[jgs001]

Tony, looks good. Thanks for the info. Not sure I'm gonna attempt it for some time yet, still working on the looking through the scope bit.

[mikestelfox]

not seen one of those before whiplash gonna have to raid my penny jar i think