M42 with a £10 lens

[speckles]

Last month I picked up a 'for spares or repair' Canon FD 135mm f/3.5 lens from fleabay for £10. It was advertised as suffering from slight fungus, which proved to be minimal and some terrestrial test shots gave encouragingly sharp results.

Then came the wait for a clear night, which finally occurred 8th - 9th November. I don't have an EQ mount of any kind, so had to put my EOS-M with my cheapo lens onto my Celestron 127SLT Alt-Az GoTo.

I took sets of 10 exposures each of 30 seconds at ISO 200 and ISO 800, ran them through DSS and then used Photoshop to tweak levels and combine the 2 resultant stacked images.

I'm quite pleased with the result, although I haven't quite got the field rotation error nailed down.

[xtreemchaos]

great image mate,  well done. thanks for posting charl.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Nice result, there are plenty of good vintage lenses out there waiting to be picked up by astronomers. I didn't realise the Canon FD lenses reached infinity focus on an EOS-M, they won't on a standard EOS camera. I've been meaning to start a thread about good budget lenses for AP, I've mostly used Takumar lenses but have also had decent results with an old Carl-Zeiss and a Vivitar lens, all on M42 on Pentak-K mounts.

[speckles]

Nice result, there are plenty of good vintage lenses out there waiting to be picked up by astronomers. I didn't realise the Canon FD lenses reached infinity focus on an EOS-M, they won't on a standard EOS camera. I've been meaning to start a thread about good budget lenses for AP, I've mostly used Takumar lenses but have also had decent results with an old Carl-Zeiss and a Vivitar lens, all on M42 on Pentak-K mounts.

Yes, when I found out I could achieve infinity focus on the EOS-M with the FD lenses I kicked myself for selling most of my old Canon kit for a song a few years ago!

[laudropb]

Very nice image and you have certainly got a bargain there.

[Stub Mandrel]

Two good captures (image and lens)!

[happy-kat]

You are lucky the FD lenses will only reach infinity focus with the EOS-m using a straight through lens mount adaptor. For my EOS mount they wont reach infinity and the adaptors with a glass element make unpleasant images.

I have an old Tamron adaptall FD mount lens that the bottom part of the lens comes off so I fitted a Tamron to Eos adaptor (no glass element) but it just falls shy of reaching infinity focus.

[fwm891]

Field rotation is down to polar alignment

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Yes, when I found out I could achieve infinity focus on the EOS-M with the FD lenses I kicked myself for selling most of my old Canon kit for a song a few years ago!

That's a shame, but there are probably plenty of cheap FD lenses out there if you want to re-acquire some. Not many people can use them so I imagine this keeps the price down.

Field rotation is down to polar alignment

The shot above was taken on an alt-az mount.

[Mr Spock]

Pretty good for a tenner!