Guerilla Astrophotography 2

 I've finally got a chance to play with my new (old) astrophotography setup.  I've been studying the stacking software, and it uses an AVI file for the source images.  It turns out that my little Canon Power Shot A560 produces AVI files.  What a nice coincidence.  Actually I think that is a standard, and I didn't know about it.  So I have a nice clear, cool evening, and the Moon is high, lets take some shots.

The Power Shot A560 has a 7.1 megapixel sensor.  Well by today's standards it is kinda small, but seems to do really well.  Playing with it tonight I found that I had to push the camera's lens in really close to the telescope eyepiece.  I'm using a 25mm Orion Sirius Plossi eyepiece.  The telescope is 1200mm focal length divided by the 25mm ocular lens gives us 48x magnification.  Then I get another 4x optical magnification from the Power Shot A560, so theoretically I can get 192x magnification from the complete system.  The shot of the Moon above is at 48x magnification.

I had this idea in my head that I needed an eyepiece camera for Christmas.  After letting that stew in my brain for several weeks I came to the conclusion that I could do this without spending several hundred dollars on an eyepiece camera, or several thousand dollars on a new Canon EOS.  Just back up, look at what you already have, and then figure out how to make a system work.  I'm kinda impressed I was able to do this without spending a lot of money.

Something else I have noticed is how dirty my camera, and telescope are, LOL!  The Camera is around 12 years old, and the telescope is about 3 years old.  I did clean the telescope about 2 weeks ago, but from this shot I can tell it's getting dusty again.  I guess it's time to scrub it down again.  If you look carefully at this last shot you can see a couple dog hairs too, LOL!  Thatz Harley, his fur covers everything I own...