Guerilla Astrophotography

 Sure I'd like to have a Canon EOS with a 20 megapixel sensor, but, you know, I don't have the scratch to make it happen.  No worries, I do have yesterday's technologies at my disposal.  I have used my phone to take astrographs, and it works fairly well, but I have been manually holding my phone in front of the eyepiece, and it is tedious getting a decent shot.  Well, look at this...

This eyepiece adapter is called SteadyPix Pro from Orion Telescope.  There have always been various telescope eyepiece adapters available for telescopes for cameras that have detachable lenses.  That makes it much easier when you can remove the lens of the camera, and then directly attach the camera to the telescope eyepiece.  I do have a 35mm Nikon F1 camera that I can do this with.  But...  It is a Film Camera, and doesn't really suit my vagabond shooting style where I post shots directly to the interwebz...

Another aspect of having a general purpose camera on the eyepiece of the telescope is that it drastically reduces the amount of equipment that I have to move around when I want to do astrophotography.  The NexImage 5 Eyepiece Camera from Celestron is a Great Sensor, but it requires support equipment.  You need to bring a computer, and cables, and a power supply.  While this might not seem like much, it consumes the time that you have available to take astrographs.  The SteadyPix Pro, and a cheap general purpose camera will allow you to take astrographs, and view them right at the telescope eyepiece.  It streamlines the process, and saves time when you want to be shooting the sky, and not setting up the computer, or troubleshooting cabling.

 

The camera that I am using is the Canon PowerShot A560, which we bought back in 2008.  Sure, kinda old, but its image sensor is still bigger than the NexImage 5 at 7.1 megapixel.  OK, now I go snap some shots...