Originally posted by madbrain I made several attempts. At 1/125 I couldn't quite keep the shots sharp. But at 1/180 they were.
I had to use F9.5 instead of F11 which was recommended earlier. F11 was underexposing with the DA 50-200.
Nice shots. It sure looks like the magnification helped !
How much does that telescope cost ?
I'm not sure why stopping down the lens is a good idea. The moon is at infinity, open it up to the lenses best aperture (on mine it's closer to f6-f8).
The magnification does help, but it's also the light gathering abilitf that a 10" scope brings. The full moon is so bright that it will almost blind you, and you'll have moon ghosting on your retina for an hour afterwards. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a $6000 lens holly crap, seriously. If you want to do astrophotography you can almost buy a mount and scope for that
The setup is an Orion Skyquest xt10i. You can almost the same scope from a different vendor for $600, and $100 for the eyepiece and afocal mounting ring. This isn't a good general astrophotography rig though, it only works on really bright things like the moon and maybe saturn/jupiter.
The "right way" to do it though is prime focus. When I took the pictures the camera was mounted to an eyepiece with 8-12 elements in it, then through a lens with ~5-6 elements. That's a LOT of glass to go through. In prime focus you mount the camera without lens straight to the scope then use the telescope as a 1250mm lens. This way you have only defects in the mirror to worry about, and it projects a great image right onto the sensor. Sadly though it's setup for visual use, and I would need to shorten the optical path to achieve prime focus. That means a new focuser or moving the main mirror about 2". A pain just to take moon shots.
Beats the pants off of a $6000 lens, probably better pictures too.