One prooved a point and the other stressed a weakness

[happy-kat]

With all the cruddy weather for ages been busy reading and planning.

In my bag of tricks sits at the base the Heritage 130p, then there is a modded Xbox cam, GSO 32mm eyepiece and thread adaptor to fit a camera and the Canon 1100d.

... today after previously doing the hold it near and shoot shot thought right lets try the GSO with a camera.

This picture shows the rig for first go, GSO 32mm eyepiece atatched to a nose cone on a Kodak DX6490 (which has a CCD chip) total weight 580grams. Other than moving the telescope balance point the weight was handled well.

First issue was the sky looked good but reality was hazy as even with just the eyepiece I could only use Jupiter with a focusing mask to actually see the spikes to gauge focus.

Once focused took the eyepiece out and loaded up with the camera being careful the whole time to not knock the focuser.

Now adjust the balance point on the scope and reinsert the eyepiece now with camera.

Fiddle with camera settings and away...

For the moon I tried single shots with 10 second timer using macro, infinity (landscape mode) did not work focus was off. No zoom.

Stacked about 5 shots with varying exposure compensation.

Another time I will use movie mode and work from there.

So onto target number 2, why not Orion, in theory was worth a go.

Ha but how Rubbish it was.

6 seconds prooved obsiously too long even with no zoom.

The shorter exposures did not pick up the nebulosity which I was surpised about given that the camera has a CCD inside (even if tiny!) ISO set at 400 and tried 800 the max available.

Oh and I think one of the many very close street lights has thrown directly onto the secondary mirror, also had similar issue with some moon shots.

So where next.

Try the Kodak again but in movie mode on the moon.

Use the Xbox webcam and try that on the moon and Jupiter.

And a thought the Canon 1100d weights 495grams, this is quite a lot less then what I had rigged up tonight, so may think about this as an option for Orion but maybe not yet spent too much time faffing and not enough time observing.

[baggywrinkle]

Go for Jupiter and maybe use the movie function and stack the images in Registax