Moon through digital camera hand held to eyepiece

[Prickly]

Attached is a happy snap of the moon throught the eyepiece with a camera hand held (22mm LVW), The scope was my vixen 140 neoachromat with the semi-apo filter on the diagonal and a light yellow filter.

I find visually this eliminates chromatic abberation quite significantly - even on very bright stars and the moon. (the semiapo filter alone is also excellent). Makes sense when you look at the spectral throughput of these filters.

Cheers
David

[peter_4059]

David,

That's a great result for hand held. Focus looks good - plenty of detail.

[Dennis]

Nice work Dave. Interesting to read about your experience and results with the filter too. Have you tried the Moon without the yellow filter?

Cheers

Dennis

[Prickly]

Hi Dennis and Peter,

Visually I use the semi-apo alone a lot but it seems so much better with the yellow filter for really bright objects (moon / planets). Really effective alone for deep sky.

With the moon visually I find the semi-apo causes a little bit of fringing near the terminator due to the high contrast - whereas adding the pale yellow too makes it sharp as a tack. Also eliminates that little bit of purple fringing still present around the moon with the semi-apo alone.

The photo here is exactly as it was straight from the camera. Thought it would give a better impression of the effect of the filter combo.

Cheers
David

[iceman]

Nice result David, with a bit of post-processing that'll come up nicely.

I'll have an attempt on the train this morning :)

[iceman]

Hi David
The initial problem with the image is that you left it at a very large resolution, while trying to jpeg compress it to under 200kb.

The best way to show images on the web is to resize them first, down to 800px or so, and then the jpeg compression only needs to be mild to get under the 200kb limit.

I've resized your image, turned it to greyscale, adjusted the levels and did some mild sharpening, to get the below. The initial image had loads of jpeg compression so this would've been better to do with the original.

Hope you don't mind, here it is.

[Prickly]

Hi Iceman,

Yes I guess it is better to resize. I put the original with colour in so you could get some idea about the filter/scope combo.

Always nice to see an improved version. The unsharp masking certainly brings out an added layer of detail doesnt it.

Cheers
David

[leon]

Nice effort David for a hand held shot, quite a lot of detail, (who says you need expensive gear to get good images.)

Leon

[janoskiss]

Nice result, very encouraging as I am gearing up to do similar afocal shots with a compact digital camera + 8" Dob. :)

[Prickly]

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Im still a little amazed it worked so well my self (especially looking at Iceman's processed image). Guess theres no harm in giving it a go.

Cheers
David