Sunday night I was out of town until late.

I went out to visit a friend who lives at a dark sky site. I drove out and hoped to get a quick glance of the sky, but wanted to stay out of the cold for the most part. I left my telescopes at home and only had a pair of 10 by 50 binoculars in the car. I was going to eat pizza near my friends dark sky site. I couldn't get ahold of him over his phone, so I ended up eating pizza and driving back toward home.

On the way back Art Parent called. Art is in the club and frequently shows up and helps out at HJRO. He can run the telescope and close up and at times opened up and ran observing nights when I was out of town.

Art recently traded a camera for a Canon T1i and was trying to take some photographs at another private observatory. He called me to ask me some questions about the Canon camera's live view features. I offered to drive by and show him some button features of his new camera, since I own a t1 I and often use it at HJRO. He took some photos of a galaxy, I forgot the exact object as I write this. He also started taking pictures of the moon.

When I finally made it back home, it was past midnight and the moon was out and the sky was clear. I decided to try to take a quick picture of the moon using a super fast setup which would be my old home build f4 four inch Newtonian and the canon Eos t1i. I have the Newtonian mirror mounted forward for astrophotography right now. I wasn't even going to use a mount, this would be pure handheld, meaning I would try to take a picture while holding the telescope and camera without even a basic telescope mount. I even attempted using a Barlow. As I started walking out of the house, I decided to grab a bag of trash and throw it out in the trash can. I actually carried my telescope and camera under one arm and took out the garbage with another. I figured that with a fast exposure and a little quick manipulation and focusing with live view, I would get a pretty decent low power photo of the moon.

I was able to focus the camera and telescope pretty well, for brief moments, but it was difficult to focus and hold the telescope tube steady with the camera on the telescope. My finder is old and the camera wanted to rotate and spin in the finders tube and also the finder didn't want to stay fixed at a single position because it's designed to be smooth for small eyepieces and will not stay fixed very well with a heavy camera mounted on it. When I went to trip the shutter, moving the camera and putting my added weight of the grip on the camera likely shifted the focus slightly as well.

I took a few stills and took some at f8 with a 2 power Barlow, and others at f4. None of them look very good, because the focus was off. It was a fun attempt and I actually kneeled on the ground and braced the telescope against one knee when taking the f8 focal length shots. Because the pictures were not really sharp and in focus I'll spare readers of the blog of those photos. I had hoped to get one in focus, but didn't spend a lot of time out outside, maybe five minutes.

Hoping to get some good photos I took a shot of the rig as I was standing on a landing. Had I spent time to take a tripod out I would have had some decent moon photos, but that would have taken another 3 minutes. I wanted to try a photo of the moon with a fully handheld rig.

The setup below, totally handheld.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad