Nice. How do you go about using a dSLR with a telescope?

Quote from Stregone :

Nice. How do you go about using a dSLR with a telescope?

I did little Google magic about subject, looks pretty interesting stuff

Interesting. I thought you might have to have a telescope designed to have a camera mounted on it.

Here's my first attempt at astrophotography Thats Mars. 30 sec exposure. 100mm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stregone/2167321259/

I took several more, and managed to get some airliners crossing the frame a few times!

Quote from XCNuse :

Night pictures aren't fun unless you're somewhere where there is very little atmosphere, and very little light polution.....

Which is precisely why I love living where I live. People ask me where I live and I tell them 30 miles from Walmart. I'm 30 miles from Butler Walmart, 30 miles from Grove City Walmart, 30 miles from Clarion Walmart, 30 miles from north Cranberry Walmart. 30 miles is pretty much the nearest "city" from me, no matter which direction I go .

It's very dark as far as light polution and I was amazed at the night sky and the stars that when I first moved here, I would lay in the yard staring up at the stars every night.

Oh, and great picture of the moon, XC. Mounting a camera to a telescope or spotting scope is something I've thought of, especially since a co-worker is very heavily into telescopes.

Back at hectic south, everything is wet and cold, still nice pics at foggy night are possible.

I think it is good pic from Volvo?

Quote from JTbo :

Back at hectic south, everything is wet and cold, still nice pics at foggy night are possible.

I think it is good pic from Volvo?

I havent had time to take any pictures myself, so to fill my need I edited your picture a bit.

And reminded me I need a new camera bad, and an HDD enclosure so I can show off more of my pictures.

EDIT: Found a good one of a couple friends while looking for some birthday pictures for someone.

I'm not a big fan of taking pictuires of people, but I love this one. I think it was with my wifes powershot sd400

Caitriona & Julian

Olympus E-510
Live View LCD
In body IS
Zuiko 14-42mm
Zuiko 40-150mm
Tamrac Express 6
no-name Tripod

I just got the camera last week, so i haven't had a chance to take a lot of pictures with it yet. But so far, what I have done, I've been very happy with.




Larger version with stars and constellations labeled

Looks like an extremely sharp lens.

Quote from JTbo :

Some pics from my week trip to up north, there was bit snow

what the helll,,, loved those pics dude

It's a lovely clear night here this evening so I took my new 70-300mm lens out to take some moon shots. See attached.

ISO 400, f/8, 1/250 sec, 300mm (480mm 35mm equiv.).
Edited in The GIMP to isolate the green channel and bring up the contrast very slightly.

Oh, and this was hand-held...I love IS!

Nice Is that cropped? If so, how much?

Quote from Stregone :

Nice Is that cropped? If so, how much?

It's quite heavily cropped. I cropped it to 800 x 600 from the original image (3888 x 2592), then shrank it to 80% (640 x 480) for posting. There was an awful lot of black space in the original!

haha...and i though i cropped my shot a lot
seriously though, that's a nice shot of the moon.

and though my focal length a decent bit shorter than yours (300mm equiv), i even had the IS disable for my shot, and think that it turned out well, using the same exposure speed (1/250).

full size crop

Quote from StewartFisher :

It's quite heavily cropped. I cropped it to 800 x 600 from the original image (3888 x 2592), then shrank it to 80% (640 x 480) for posting. There was an awful lot of black space in the original!

Nice. Still alot of detail in that. Is that lens the 70-300mm USM IS canon lens? I really wanna telephoto, but am leaning more towards the 400mm L prime lens. But it doesn't have IS How do you like that lens? It would be a good halfway stop for me while I save up, hehe.

SNOW! This one of the few times in the past 5 years that we've actually gotten snow


puppy's not a fan

Hah, awesome shots. I took some during the snowfall too, but nothing spectacular. Didn't have time to fiddle with settings and had to use my 50mm f/1.7 manual because of the failing light. Focusing was a pain.

Nice shots guys.
I took these pics with Tamron 80-210, f 3.8 legacy manual lens.

Some pics I took with a cheap 2MP camera. The safety steward had a talk with me after the event lol

http://darksideracing.net/gall ... ls.php?album=6&page=1

Quote from glyphon :

haha...and i though i cropped my shot a lot
seriously though, that's a nice shot of the moon.

and though my focal length a decent bit shorter than yours (300mm equiv), i even had the IS disable for my shot, and think that it turned out well, using the same exposure speed (1/250).

full size crop

Thanks...I probably shouldn't have done the 80% resize now that I think about it. I was expecting the 100% crop to look a bit blurry but it seemed pretty sharp to me.

What white balance did you use for that shot of the moon? My first shot of the moon last night turned out like that because I forgot I'd left the camera set on some crazy custom WB It's quite nice though...I did think of adding some toning to my shot, but I whatever I tried, I kept going back to the B/W version.

Quote from Stregone :

Nice. Still alot of detail in that. Is that lens the 70-300mm USM IS canon lens?

Yes, the non-DO version.

Quote :

I really wanna telephoto, but am leaning more towards the 400mm L prime lens. But it doesn't have IS How do you like that lens? It would be a good halfway stop for me while I save up, hehe.

I've not had much of a chance to use it since Christmas, but I have been pleased with what I have managed to do with it. I'll really see how well it performs next time I take it to Silverstone, which is what it was bought for. The only downside that I can see is that, although it's got USM, it's only a Micro-USM rather than a proper Ring-USM. This means it's not much faster focussing than a standard Micro-Motor drive, and it doesn't have full time manual focus enabled. Oh, and the front element rotates when focussing, so using a polariser is a little frustrating at times.

The 400mm f/5.6L is a really nice lens, but the 70-300 is half the price...it doesn't make sense to me to buy a 'stop-gap' lens for half the price of the one you really want! You could buy the old 75-300 USM (non IS) for less than $200 and be $350 closer to getting the 400mm prime! It's not as sharp at the long end as the much newer 70-300mm, but it might suit you until you get the 400mm.

About IS...it depends on what sort of shooting you'll be doing. If you don't mind carrying a tripod around with you then you don't need IS. If you usually shoot moving objects then you'll probably want to use a shutter speed fast enough to prevent subject motion blur, in which case you probably won't have a problem with camera shake either. However, if you like taking shots of still objects in low-ish light then IS is invaluable. Some of the shots I took last night at 1/160 were a little blurred, but the ones at 1/250 and above were all sharp.

Quote from StewartFisher :

What white balance did you use for that shot of the moon? My first shot of the moon last night turned out like that because I forgot I'd left the camera set on some crazy custom WB It's quite nice though...I did think of adding some toning to my shot, but I whatever I tried, I kept going back to the B/W version.

i think the WB was on "sun", but that's not what the image looked like straight off the camera.

first, i opened it in photoshop and cropped it.
next, i added a threshold adjustment layer, and set the slider to where there where only a few points of white pixels remaining and clicked ok. then i switched the color sampler tool* and clicked on one of the white pixels. i then did the same thing for black pixels. and then deleted the threshold adjustment layer.

now that the brightest and darkest points in the image marked, i added a levels adjusment layer, and in the levels screen, selected the highlights eye dropper and clicked the bright point, and then selected the shadows eye dropper and clicked the dark point. clicked ok, and then saved.

it sounds like a lot, but it is really a 2 minute process at the longest.

* eye dropper that leaves registration marks where you click

Glyphon, whereabouts in ATL do you live?

I'm in Smyrna

Ah, cool. East Cobb here.

Quote from glyphon :

i think the WB was on "sun", but that's not what the image looked like straight off the camera.

first, i opened it in photoshop and cropped it.
next, i added a threshold adjustment layer, and set the slider to where there where only a few points of white pixels remaining and clicked ok. then i switched the color sampler tool* and clicked on one of the white pixels. i then did the same thing for black pixels. and then deleted the threshold adjustment layer.

now that the brightest and darkest points in the image marked, i added a levels adjusment layer, and in the levels screen, selected the highlights eye dropper and clicked the bright point, and then selected the shadows eye dropper and clicked the dark point. clicked ok, and then saved.

it sounds like a lot, but it is really a 2 minute process at the longest.

* eye dropper that leaves registration marks where you click

That's pretty much the same method I used to increase the contrast in my shot, except that I just eyeballed the histogram and set the white point to the highest luminance value in the histogram

I also ditched the red and blue channels from the JPG. The image as-shot was almost perfectly monochrome and the green channel seemed to have more resolution and less noise than the other two (this is probably a result of the RGBG Bayer filter).

Quote from halo :

Nice shots guys.
I took these pics with Tamron 80-210, f 3.8 legacy manual lens.

nice shots halo. looks like there is just a hint of vinetting in those. where you using a couple filters, or was that just from the lens you used? regardless, i think it works really well on these pictures.