iPhone holder over eyepiece

[Joe beaumont]

I have recently bought a celestron nexstar 8se and tonight I thought I would try and use it with this new iPhone holder to get some pictures through my phone and I have this bright circle that I see on my iPhone but when you look through the eyepiece it is fine. Could someone help me with this as I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, I have left a couple of pictures below. Seeing conditions also were very poor it was really cloudy and had to wait for clouds to pass to quickly get a snap shot 

thank you 

joe 

[AstroNebulee]

12 minutes ago, Joe beaumont said:

I have recently bought a celestron nexstar 8se and tonight I thought I would try and use it with this new iPhone holder to get some pictures through my phone and I have this bright circle that I see on my iPhone but when you look through the eyepiece it is fine. Could someone help me with this as I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, I have left a couple of pictures below. Seeing conditions also were very poor it was really cloudy and had to wait for clouds to pass to quickly get a snap shot 

thank you 

joe 

What were you looking at at the time, was the phone to close or far away from the eyepiece maybe? 

[Stu]

@Joe beaumont I suspect you were holding the phone either too close or too far away from the eyepiece. Trying moving it towards or away from the eyepiece and the view should open out to show a circle with a sharp edge which is the field stop of the eyepiece.

It is much easier to try this on the Moon first as it is so much brighter and easier to practise focusing on.

Keep at it, you can get some surprisingly good results with phones these days.

[Owmuchonomy]

As above plus with some phones you will have to ‘force’ it to focus, i.e., with an iPhone touch the screen where the bright image is to focus and also bring up the exposure control.

[Stu]

I found these two examples of what happens when you are too close vs correctly positioned which might help.

[Joe beaumont]

Yeah I think I might have been too far away from the eyepiece I will be sure to try the moon when we next have a clear sky 

thanks all 

joe 

[John]

I've done a bit of imaging using a phone held over the eyepiece and found, as Stu says, that the positioning of the phone camera over the eyepiece lens is really critical to the results. A tiny movement or tilt and the image is skewed or over exposed, out of focus or all three !

I now use a low cost phone holder which helps keep the "sweet spot" positioning. I find that I use the "zoom" feature on the phone camera combined with a zoom eyepiece which together give some room for framing and increasing  or decreasing the image scale. The phone software actually does quite a good job of getting a decent exposure and sharp focus if you can get things lined up and keep them there.