I borrowed a Canon EOS 1000D for the weekend, and was lucky to get some clear sky both on Friday and again tonight (Sunday). On Friday I was mostly working out focus travel issues, what modifications might be need, and how to get any heavenly bodies in focus. Tonight I tried a planet, the moon, and some stars.
Once again I used the Canon DSLR with the slim line T-Ring resting on the SkyWatcher's 40mm silver focuser thread (exposed by removing the large black eye-piece holder). I was lucky tonight in that the Moon, Jupiter and Orion were all at about the same elevation, at an angle which gave me a surprisingly stable hands free shooting opportunity:
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| Jupiter (and moons), over exposed and wobbly (when zoom in), Canon EOS 1000D, single exposure, no cropping, no editing, prime-focus with SkyWatcher Explorer 130M telescope (SK1309EQ2). |
While trying the lunar photos, the wobble from pressing the shutter was easier to see - so I took advantage of using the 10s delay option to allow the telescope to settle (if I buy one of these Canon EOS cameras, getting a remote shutter cable seems a good idea). This combined with the fact I wasn't having to hold the camera seemed to work much better:
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| Half moon. Canon EOS 1000D, single exposure, no cropping, no editing, prime-focus with SkyWatcher Explorer 130M telescope (SK1309EQ2). |
Finally I tried the Orion Nebula (M42) at the tip of Orion's dagger - not a long enough exposure to capture anything other than the main stars, but a pleasing result. When you zoom in there is vertical smearing of the starts (also seen in the Jupiter shot) where I can't have done my polar alignment very well, or perhaps hadn't tightened the clutches enough while photographing.
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  | Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Orion nebula (M42). Canon EOS 1000D, single exposure, no cropping, no editing, prime-focus with SkyWatcher Explorer 130M telescope. | Orion nebula (M42). Canon EOS 1000D, single exposure, no cropping, brightness adjustment only. Annotated by hand, with rough compass added. |
I found these results very encouraging - for a start, other than looking up how to turn on live view in the manual, and turning on the 10s timer delay, these are all 'point-and-shoot' default settings. Also, for DSLR astrophotography there is an incentive to perfect my polar alignment so that my RA motor can counteract the Earth's rotation.
Update (30 March 2012):
I brought myself a second hand Canon EOS 1000D on eBay, worked out how to install the Canon EOS Utility software on Mac OS X, and will try more astrophotography once it stops snowing.
