Pictures of the Moon I took through My Telescope

Here are some pictures of the moon I took through my telescope using my digital camera.







The telescope uses different interchangeable eyepieces that give different magnifications. I bought an adapter that allowed me to attach my digital camera (just a regular Nikon Coolpix) onto an eyepiece. With something like the moon, you can use the camera's zoom to get the image framed the way you want, and then get things focused as well as you can with the telescope's focuser, and then the camera's auto-focus will automatically do the last bit of focusing.

There are a lot of different ways to take pictures through a telescope. Some of them use very specialized equipment. Some people use the digital camera method like I did. And then there are some systems that are based on web cams, and you use a laptop to capture and process the images.

The moon is a very easy thing to image, because it is very bright, so it does not take a long exposure. And it is big and has easily visible features, so it gives your camera something to auto-focus on. Star clusters and distant deep-sky objects are harder because they take very long exposures, and you have to have a system for tracking them very precisely as they move across the sky. For planets, people get good results with web cams and using a process called "stacking" that uses software to "stack" a lot of short exposure images into one single image to build up the details.