Haven't had the scope out for ages, namely weather and motivation to setup stopped me (only to be trounced with bad weather after setup).
Anyway, I had wanted to test a few things tonight. Some of you here are quite capable in the photography side of things, but I am quite a noob to the photography stuff. I know a bit on the standard "stills" camera, but I'm learning off you guys and I'm just diving straight in and using my errors as a learning tool.
Couple of things came out of tonight, that I learned about.
Namely apart from the weather that snuck in, was that "Humidity", "Prime Focus" and "Macro setting".
I did a really rough setup tonight, as I was just purely wanting to know, if the HD camcorder could do anything at night.
Even though the Moon was a bright light source, it (The camcorder) did quite well in the dark areas.
Camcorder on a tripod and fitted with a Wide Angle Lens, Scope with no EP and Camcorder was in Macro mode. I had forgotten that the "focal point" was right in front of the camera, not down the tube as I had always thought. Stupid me...That's why it never worked before.
The Camcorder is not connected to the scope at all, as it was just a trial, but very fiddly.
Here is the video (it is in 1080P) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVyBqUzZJ9M
Since I got a weather station now and live in Melbourne, I have been learning what is good enough weather for viewing. I started at 6 C with 85% humidity and it was just ok for the trial, but then the temp dropped a little further and the humidity went to 97%. Dew and major haze.
Where I live, anything over 70-75% humidity is disasterous, due to the lights reflecting off the water vapour, from the local burbs around me. Let alone summer bushfires to bring in the haze too
I can just make out 4.0 (4.5 max) mag stars on an average night. (unaided eye)
I have a few more vids, but have to go through them to see if anything is good enough, to prove a good result in prime focus.
But I think it worked out well, considering it was very rough setup.
