Moon though my telescope

STM

Senior Member
The clouds finally cleared for long enough to get a shot of the moon through my telescope. My Celestron Nexstar 8SE is a 2032mm f/10 catadioptric telescope. The moon pretty much filled the entire frame vertically with the D850 mounted, I added some additional black background in the image in Photoshop. Exposure was 1/320 sec @ ISO 800. I used Live View for composition and focusing and used the self timer to make sure all vibrations had died down. With that magnification, even imperceptible vibration caused some pretty noticeable camera shake.

The clarity in a 100% crop is amazing, a lot better than I can get with the 600mm f/4 ED IF AIS and TC-300 on the D500 (around 1800mm equivalent when you take into account crop factor). The camera mounts directly to the back of the telescope. I guess I could also mount it to the 90º diagonal (where the eyepiece is mounted in the photo) but I would probably get some vignetting.

75% waxing gibbous.jpg

telescope.jpg
 
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