[Bmanners]

Ok, I've been insired by the photos shown on this and other sites but haven't really put the effort in to have a go myself. That was until I saw the competition on this site for beginners. I now have a purpose and motivation to get off my lazy behind and take some photos.

So first step is to find out how do this astrophotography thing....lots of reading on the internet. Next grap a camera and wack it onto a scope...easy right?,.,,,wrong. I managed to figure out how to remove the lense from a bullet camera I have and made an adaptor for it so I could use the afocal method. So far so good. Actually viewing something was quite difficult as the camera seems to have a much smaller FOV than an ep. After a bit of trouble I managed to get Jupiter in the camera's FOV but I couldn't get a sharp focus. I recorded a few minutes of video anyhow so I have images to learn how to use the software for image manipulation.

The equipment I have is a 76mm reflector (wobbletronic), a sony EXVIEW HAD CCD (480lines) bullet camera feeding a panasonic camcorder which can then download onto a PC. I tried with a 3x barlow and with just the camera either way I couldn't get good focus.

So my questions are:
- why is that an ep can get good focus on jupiter but the camera can't? is the camera not alighned right, does the camera highlight the limitations of my scope, is the scope not aligned well enough for what I am trying to do?
- Is this type of camera suitable for this type of job?
- whats the best software to process the avi file?
- Am I being a little too ambitous trying to image Jupiter with this equipment?

I think I have attached a frame grab from the video....not sure where it went though....

Cheers
Brett