Greetings all,
So now as the weather starts to warm up, I'm thinking about trying to spend a bit more time with this looking at stars thing.
I bought a Celestron Astromaster 130EQ with the tracking motor about a year ago as a combined birthday present for myself and my daughter. She is really into the whole space thing so it's been fun to learn a bit together.
With a variety of eyepieces/barlow we've had no problems getting up close and personal with the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter (and moons) and checking out binary stars. I know very well what it's useful magnification limit is, but on good nights and patience I've been pretty impressed with the results. The tracking motor works really well, and once I figured out the whole alignment thing I can set the scope up and watch Saturn for hours without hardly needing to touch it at all.
I started to dabble with taking photos. At first just using my mobile phones camera held up to the eyepiece, and then using my computers webcam with a custom made eyepiece mount (some foam and rubber bands). Considering the setup, I'm pretty damn impressed with the photos I've managed to pull off! Tried a couple of attempts with registax but I've never really been able to get enough continuous shots for it to work.
I recently got myself a DSLR (Canon 650D), and while using it for astrophotography is not the main reason I got it, it's something I'd like to try with it. I think I've worked out which T-mount bits and pieces I need, but after reading some of the other posts here I'm not sure if the telescope will be able to get focus with the DSLR? Does anyone know how I can work out if it would work before I by the bits?
If it won't work then I'll just look at re-working my webcam mount instead. I don't think I could get permission to buy another telescope at this time just for this purpose
