So I've finally found some time to take some pictures. I was out of town for almost a month for work so that got in my way.
I did manage to fix my focus shift problem (before going out of town) that my 2080 was having by taking it apart and finding the grease was all dried out. I did a collimation check with a bright light after reassembling the scope but forgot to fine tune it the other night on a star (forgot) before taking the pictures. This might explain the slight out of focus look.
I used Cannon Connect on my phone to work the shutter. That worked out pretty good. I took this shot right after sunset that is why the background it so blue. I kind of like it other than it's a bit overexposed (to me anyway)
Here is the picture (.jpg I do have a RAW version)
Image data:
Of course this was in Auto mode with the flash turned off. I tried to take a pictue of Saturn but could not get the focus right before it dropped behind the trees then I realized I hadn't performed a fine tune collimation adjustment. While doing that Murphy's Law cropped up and my cameras battery died.
I am going to try again tonight. Any suggestions on manual settings are greatly apprciated. It should be a good night of seeing as a cold front came through yesterday and it should be good seeing conditions tonight.
Nice to see you have things working!
As you noticed, it's over-exposed. But it's easy to get a correct exposure when imaging the moon because it's brightness is consistent (since the Sun is illuminating with a consistent amount of light). You can use a guideline called the "Loony 11" rule. "Loony" for the moon (a bad play on "Lunar") and "11" because the relationship explained by the rule only works at f/11.
That rule says: If you use f/11, you can set the shutter speed to the inverse of the ISO setting.
Based on this rule, a photographer could use f/11, ISO 100, and 1/100th. Or ISO 200 and 1/200th, or ISO 400 and 1/400th, etc.
But you don't have an f/11 scope... it's an f/10 scope (and telescopes don't have adjustable aperture blades or waterhouse stops) -- so you are 1/3rd stop faster than f/11. But that means you can just dial the shutter to 1/3rd stop shorter duration of the ISO (that's one click on your shutter speed dial) and you're back in business.
So... whereas you could use f/11, ISO 100, and 1/100th sec... you are at f/10, but you could use ISO 100 and 1/125th sec exposure time -- and this would nail the moon for you ... every time!
The exposure below was taken using the "Loony 11" rule.
The surface of the moon has an "albedo" of .12 -- the "albedo" is the surface reflectivity or you can think of it as the amount of light that is reflected back off the surface expressed as a fraction of the total light. So .12 means 12% of the light that hits the surface will be reflected back. This happens to almost exactly match the surface albedo of a "worn aspalt" road (not freshly laid aspalt -- which is darker.)
Saturn will be more difficult and capturing Saturn will be easier if you put the camera in "video" mode, reduce the resolution to 640x480, and capture about 30 seconds to perhaps 1 minutes worth of video. You can then use "Registax" or "AutoStakkert" (both are free programs) to perform image stacking and this will result in a much cleaner image after processing.
There are numerous videos on how to use either program to do planetary imaging.
One more thing... Saturn is very low in the sky (Earth northern axis is pointed toward the sun in summer, but that means our northern axis is pointed away from Saturn. This puts Saturn low in the sky for northern hemisphere observers at that time of year.) As a consequence, the atmosphere will distort your view of saturn by acting like a lens or prism. It will disperse the light so that the light is starting to split into a rainbow spectrum. If you look closely at saturn, you'll notice one edge of the planet has a blue fringe on the edge... the opposite side has a red fringe. This will result in a blurring of the entire object (even if the scope is in perfect focus). The image processing programs (I know Registax has this feature and I think (but am less certain) that AutoStakkert can do it too)) have the ability to split the image into it's red, green, and blue channels, and then slide them back together again so they converge into a sharper image. (In the old days when astrophotography was done with film there used to be a prism type device called an "Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector" or "ADC". You can still buy such a device and a "cheap" one would be about $500. But thanks to digital imaging technology and image processing software, you can digitally correct for this and do not need to buy an ADC.
