Normally I don't bother setting up the old Tasco when the Moon is bright, especially here in Newark, with its murky, light-polluted sky, but a while back it was unusually clear and cool, and Jupiter was in a good spot to see it from the kitchen window. I will probably be making a proper camera mount soon, but these were shot just holding my little SD1100 as steady as I could next to the eyepiece. Tried it with a tripod and it was just too much trouble. So... they're a little blurry.

All of these have been rotated to show them as they might appear to the naked eye (the 'scope inverts the field of view, and I forgot that when taking the pics).


Full of view of the waxing gibbous Moon; 20X eyepiece.




Closer look at the south polar region; pretty good view of Tycho (the small crater with the very bright, long rays) and Shickard (the shallow but very wide crater to the left, near the shadow line). Used the Barlow extension for this (doubles the magnification).




Very hard to hold the camera still enough, but this isn't too bad, considering... Jupiter and its four primary moons. Just the 20X eyepiece again. Normally, when the scope is collimated properly and the air is still and dry, with my scope you can just barely make out the cloud bands of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn are pretty clear, too.

I may get some clearer pictures later, if I ever get around to making that mount. Might even get some decent long-exposure shots of some more distant objects.

My uncle used to do a lot of astrophotography with his old film SLR cameras and expensive telescopes. He took a lot of incredible photos of the moon, stars, planets, nebulas, and other stuff

a1 wrote on Dec 16^th, 2009 at 1:51am:

It really does take a lot of patience...lots of setting up, etc. in exchange for a few minutes of "wow". 

But I've always found it was worth it, especially if you're hunting for the more distant, dim objects (without a fancy GPS-assisted "slew to" telescope). I still think it's pretty cool that you can use this device to peer into the very distant past- the light from even the nearest star takes over four years to get here; take a look at the Andromeda galaxy and you're looking at it as it appeared over 2 million years ago!! And the first time you manage to resolve a bright point of light into a gas giant with its attendant moons... it's just cool. 

If you lack patience, the Moon is a big, fat, easy target, and good for quite a bit of looking on any given night.

I do the same with telescopes looking at planes! The only thing I really say today were a boeing 767-300 and a DC-8-60 Really cool shot there!