On the night of Aug 26/27, 2009, I tried using my Nikon D50 camera to take some photographs of the sky, in two modes:
Conditions were fair, but not great. This was more of an exploratory mission than a real attempt, but I learned some good lessons.
I took a set of pictures of the first-quarter moon, low in the sky, through the telescope. I used an exposure time of 1/160 sec, at the f/10 set by the telescope. The camera was set at ISO 800, and it saved the images as JPG (not RAW) at an intermediate size of 2256x1496 pixels. The results had a distinctly blue tinge. I combined several with the excellent Hugin panorama-creation program to make this image:
You can click on the image to see the full-size version. Beware -- it's 2673x3982 and over 4 MB in size.
Using a lower ISO speed would decrease the graininess, I think.
Last modified 8/26/2009 by MWR.