h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About a year ago, I bought a mounting for my telescope - a sort of tube and ring attachment - enabling it to be connected to an SLR camera. I was confidently assured that I could now take photos of the distant heavens. I was very excited about it, but when I rushed out to try my new contraption I was bitterly disappointed. Distant objects remained massively unfocused and no matter what I did, I couldn't get anything to appear in the camera that looked in any way crisp or coherent .

The camera attachment was shelved and I went about my life, frustrated that my hopes of a shining astrophotographical career had been cut off so cruelly in their infancy..

Anyhow, as Jupiter is now shining brilliantly in the evening sky, I tried once again a few nights ago to set up my telescope and to solve the mystery of the non-functioning attachment. Once more all I could get was unfocused blobs, but I did discover something: it was focusing quite well on the very near distance. If I had wanted to take an astronomical photo of the door handle close by, it would have done a marvelous job. How to solve this puzzle?

And then, the discovery. The telescope eyepieces seemed to fit into the attachment's tube comfortably well. What if...?

Let's just say I immediately felt like a complete idiot.

It was very fulfilling to take a photo of Jupiter and it's moons for the first time. I haven't yet got it quite right: Jupiter is still very indistinct. I can't see any banding on the planet, but the moons do appear quite well.

What I can't do so well is to image the dimmer stars. I have quite good visibility where I live and the telescope does a good job of picking up the dimmer stars of the Milky Way, but the images don't make their way into the camera, no matter how aggressively I set the shutter time. Is 30 seconds far too short? It it even possible to image a star field through a 70mm lens?

The quest continues..

Hi Woodpigeon

This is what I get when I start aimlessly exploring my old PS code saved as a guide page instead of working at my thesis. I found a link to the Living Earth Society, created by your good self, jumped to your PS, clicked on a conversation and end up here.

In terms of your telescope, have you checked out the h2g2 Astronomical Society at A413876 ? Deke ( U27380 ) has recently resurrected it and you might find an "expert" over there who could help with the photography issue.

Questions that come to my mind are:
1. What type of telescope have you got and what camera?
2. Have you tried to set things up in Prime Focus - that is using the scope as the camera lens?

I found this site that has some beginners advice - http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP.HTM

t.

Hi turvy,

Hey thanks a lot for that - I think I should check it out. I haven't tried again since (one of the big reasons being that the weather hasn't been up to much until very recently) and I have a feeling that I need to give the camera a bit more exposure than it has been given to date.

My little baby is a Meade ETX 70.

As for the long dead Living Earth society, I have often harboured a desire to resurrect it in blog form, if only for the fact that I have precious little time to do it justice.

thanks! W