Posts Tagged ‘celestron’

Reducer lens

Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Aug 31 2009

I’ve just ordered a reducer lens for NexImage, which will double my field of vision - meaning I’ll be able to record more of the moon (or whatever my subject is!) in one shot.  Ordered from Telescope Planet again, so fingers crossed they’re quick off the mark! Hopefully should get it in the next few days.

For my readers in the US, the reducer lens is available through Amazon.com: Celestron NexImage Reducer Lens



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Video from yesterday’s moon watching

Astrophotography, Gallery | Posted by Carol
Aug 30 2009

If there’s one thing yesterday’s video recording has taught me, it’s the need for polar alignment and a drive motor. Without a drive motor, the object being recorded drifts out of view in the telescope (as you can see above). A drive motor allows the telescope to automatically track stars as they move across the sky and they will therefore appear stationary in the telescope’s view.

The drive motor for my Celestron C6-N Telescope is the Celestron Motor Drive, DA for CG-4 mounts (model #93522) and costs around £125 (£125.35 + p&p from 365Astronomy.com)



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Astrophotography

Astrophotography | Posted by Carol
Aug 21 2009

I’m particularly interested in taking photographs of what I see through the telescope so I’ve been doing some research into the options available.

  • Specialist CCD astrophotography cameras: these start from around £300 upwards and look to be the best way to clearly photograph the night sky. Unfortunately it’s WAY out of my budget!
  • Although, I’ve seen the Celestron NexImage Solar System CCD Imager, which is £134 and looks like it would be perfect.
  • I’ve tried doing what I think is called Afocal Coupling (where I just point the camera right up at the lens and shoot). I’ve only tried this in daylight (thanks to the lack of clear skies at night) but the picture was quite fuzzy and affected badly by vignette. (Vignette is when an image is missing its sides - e.g. a square image shown with round edges). I still need to try this at night.
  • Adapting a webcam - I’ve seen a couple of tutorials on different ways to “adapt” a webcam for astrophotography. One pretty much just involves screwing it into an adapter whereas the other one is a more complex taking-the-webcam-to-bits procedure. I think I do have an old webcam sitting around somewhere so I might look into this one! Minor detail is that I have to use the telescope outside due to the view being obstructed by neighbouring buildings, so I’m not sure how I’m going to power up the webcam without a laptop. This is also a problem for the NexImage CCD Imager.

So it seems that I either need a specialist camera, or a mount of some kind to use my existing camera.



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