Last night's gibbous moon

[Tomahawk]

Taken from my backyard using a Nikon D40 attached to a Stellarvue SV80S telescope, and post-processed in Aperture.

480mm, ISO400, 1/500 sec, F6

 

[shadowfax]

that's good stuff!

 

[bassman]

Damn, I want a telescope. Nice shot.

 

[armyoffoo]

Very nice, how big is your original image?

 

[Tomahawk]

Very nice, how big is your original image?

The original image is 3008x2000 -- 6 megapixels total -- 94% of which is of black empty space.

Using this camera's CCD chip size (23.7 × 15.6 mm) at this focal length (480mm), the moon occupied an area roughly 600x600, or just .36 megapixels.

 

[Joves]

Nice lunar shot.

 

[Kadath]

How do you mount the camera on to a telescope, and how hard is it to focus?

Great shot BTW

 

[thunderstruck!]

More like mount the telescope on the camera .

I would also like to know how you focused the shot.

 

[Joves]

How do you mount the camera on to a telescope, and how hard is it to focus?

Great shot BTW

They make adapters for the camera to fit to the focuser. Or you can do it afocally. Which is best done using a 50mm camera lense set at infinity, the you have to mount it to whatever eyepiece you are using. I like shooting afocally myself but, the pic looks like it was done with an adapter for the focuser.

 

[Tomahawk]

How do you mount the camera on to a telescope, and how hard is it to focus?

Great shot BTW

I used a camera adapter and t-mount:

Here they are assembled together:

Once assembled, you simply attach them to the camera:

And then slide the camera into the scope's focuser:

Focusing the image is done manually. The camera is simply taking the place of an eyepiece.

Nailing the focus, however, can be a bit tricky because you have to look through the camera's tiny viewfinder, but it works well enough.