Fun with the spotting scope

[Fast14riot]

Last night was very clear with little haze, so I got out my KonuSpot 20-60x80 spotting scope, set up on my tripod, put a phone adapter on the eyepiece and a star chart.

Captured Jupiter and 4 of its moons, as well as Saturn and its rings. Phone cameras aren't best in low light and the digital zoom is not ideal, either, but you can clearly see these with the naked eye to your scope as well.

 

[Crow]

Impressive!

Think I heard somewhere it takes the light reflected by Jupiter about 30 minutes to reach the earth these days, given the current alignment of the two planets... much longer for Saturn. I forget how many moons Jupiter has, but it's a bunch...

 

[Fast14riot]

Impressive!

Think I heard somewhere it takes the light reflected by Jupiter about 30 minutes to reach the earth these days, given the current alignment of the two planets... much longer for Saturn. I forget how many moons Jupiter has, but it's a bunch...

About 43 minutes from the Sun to Jupiter, and 35-52 minutes from Jupiter to Earth, depending on which side of the sun they're each on. Jupiter has 79 moons!

 

[Willie]

Took this pic of the moon last time it was full. Used a Nikon P-1000 that I bought as a replacement for my spotter. It's lighter than the spotter and faster than digiscoping.

It worked very well on a recent scouting trip to Colorado, even though I used it hand-held it took some nice pics.

 

[praveen]

I was doing exactly the same thing last night and took some pics of Jupiter and moon but here around Seattle area some light clouds made the pictures a bit hazy. Gotta wait for clear skies and hope the someday Kowa makes an adapter for iPhone 8. iPhone 6 doesn't have enough resolution.

 

[Fast14riot]

Heres a moon shot I did a couple years ago with my spotting scope, you can see the chromatic aberration very clearly



This shot I took with my Nikon and 900mm telephoto on a tripod and remote release.



The optical performance difference is night and day, so to speak.

 

[JMayo]

Wow, I saw a really bright star last night and got my phone, which has an app that tells what is up there,
it was Jupiter ! Cool !

 

[Riesel]

I like em all.

 

[ronsatspokane]

Handheld (braced of course) 400L lens on Canon body. Thinking about a field flattner for a Williams Optical scope I've got. Maybe a full frame body as well. It'd make a nice astrograph but would need to stack images for deep space shots.

 

[Fast14riot]

Image stacking is great for celestial bodies that produce very low light, also a tracking head tripod. For shooting the moon, I shoot almost entirely in manual mode and from the hip using the Lunar 11 rules (think Sunny 16, but for the moon). I've been tempted to play around with image stacking, but not having a tracking head makes things a bit more difficult in post.

 

[mousegunner]

I used my TSN-1 with the LER at 27x and had some good views. I also used my Zhuemell 20-60x and had good results but would have been better if I got away from the city.

 

[ronsatspokane]

Image stacking is great for celestial bodies that produce very low light, also a tracking head tripod. For shooting the moon, I shoot almost entirely in manual mode and from the hip using the Lunar 11 rules (think Sunny 16, but for the moon). I've been tempted to play around with image stacking, but not having a tracking head makes things a bit more difficult in post.

Yeah, that moon shot was manual. I opened up the f stop as far as I could go for the lens then played with shutter speed until I ended up with a decent exposure. I've had the large equatorial mounts (Losmondy G11) and high end refractors for it (Takahashi 4 inch, TV85) but I got rid of all that. Too much setup time and living in Seattle at that time I had the same problem Praveen runs into. He has to come over to my house to get better sky's but even here there is a lot of light pollution to the south these days. Can't wait to see what that Kowa of his will do when he assembles the components and starts capturing.

I did finally break down and order the field flattener for the Williams last night. Should try to shoot through the Vortex HD in the meantime. Probably won't though.

 

[Stepsjframe]

All Beautiful pictures, the moon is a very strange celestial body though.

 

[T-shooter]

Here is an old picture I took with a Canon camera with the exif data included, reduced to 800 pixels in width to fit here. Never tried one through my spotting scope.

 

[justinp61]

I took these through my wife's telescope just holding my phone to the ocular.

 

[joshb]

Back in my college days, a guy had a telescope trained on the girls dorm. THAT was fun!

 

[Gun Smith]

Back in my college days, a guy had a telescope trained on the girls dorm. THAT was fun!

Did they "MOON" you?

 

[jlshaw]

Those are great photos. My daughter and I did much the same a few years ago during a lunar eclipse. She and I still think that was a cool night.

 

[Stepsjframe]

The Pictures show the planets are really cool, does anyone know the time of the year other planet are visible to earth ?

 

[justinp61]

Solar eclipse.