Photos from binoculers

[medwatt]

Hello,

I have to admit that I suffer from some anxiety over relatively new things in my life from time to time. I have read a lot of the binoculars review on this site and I can't but feel a twinge of disappointment whenever I read someone claiming how sharp and bright the moon look looked through such and such binoculars compared to some other one. I have since then plunged myself into a thorough searching regime in google but was disappointed again to find a very modest quantity of  photographs taken from binoculars. Given that this site is dedicated solely to such exercises, I therefore plead anyone with binoculars to take a picture through the lenses and post them here. It will provide a great way for people to be inspired to buy them apart from the fact that we can have great images.

Thanks and star posting !!

[Steve Ward]

Unfortunately taking decent photographs through a binocular is no easy thing , anything more than a snapshot with a 'point and shoot' or a phone is going to be hard to find , and that will be no way to judge the quality of the binocular.

I would put my faith in the reviews in the "Binocular" section here on SGL and in particular in those by Mr Steve Tonkin of Binocularsky.com ..... http://binocularsky.com/ .... 

[Langy]

I've a small cheap set of binoculars and tried to take a picture on my phone with them. In daylight they worked pretty well, even recorded an HD video with some quality loss as I was doing it through my office double glazed window. The phone was held in place with a couple of elastic bands where the phone rested over both EP.

Now when I tried to capture the moon I soon found out that all the phones I have just can't cope with the exposure. I also had the same issue with afocal on the telescope but managed to get some reasonable images with the compact. If you are looking at taking images of the night sky then any afocal image is going to be hard, best to mount the binoculars on a tripod and have the camera either fixed to them or on another tripod, it will be very fiddly.

Most people use webcams for lunar and planetary images, not sure if this is possible with binoculars, but I've found that a reasonable lens on a camera and tripod work just as well for the night sky. My 300mm lens give me nearly 10x magnification where with stacking you can get some cracking images. For DSO with colour from the Nebula you really need some good equipment and tracking for lots of long exposures.