1100mm f/10.5

[Dr. Harout]

Yesterday I received my adapter, specially made to make my MTO-1000 (1100mm f/10.5) fit on my A700.
First thing I wanted to do was to shoot the moon, but was rainy with thunderstorms. So early morning I made some shots as testing.
The lens is quite heavy and very hard to focus, and a slight movement looses your subject.
So here we go.
All pictures are with NO CROP

Test 1


Test 2


Test 3

[aster]

Lovely! No wonder it's hard to focus with that range...
I suppose the pigeon was actually on top of the power/phone line pole of the second photo? I'm impressed that there's no blur, even a slight motion blur.

Thanks for the sharing
Yildiz

[Dr. Harout]

Thanks Yildiz,
Really it was very hard to focus, though was mounted on a sturdy Slik tripod.
On the full blown out pictures, they are very soft and lack contrast, but with a little PP, namely contrast, sharpness and WB fixed them a bit.
Of course it's not a general purpose lens, but worth a try.
I made several shots some with SSS and some without. I'll do a thorough analysis to see which is better and I'll let everyone aware.
Thanks for looking.

[Greg Beetham]

You've done very well there Dr. H,
I'm guessing that it's a telescope at prime focus and fixed apature of f10.5, I believe you when you say it was difficult too focus, focussing at f10 makes for very dark viewing indeed, but the results are nice and sharp though if you struggle with it. You can now get planetary drive focussers, one of my friends in our Astonomy club has one and it makes life quite a bit easier for fine focussing, (if you don't have one already that is).
Greg
ps Did you have too flip the image back up the right way?

[Dr. Harout]

I'm guessing that it's a telescope at prime focus and fixed apature of f10.5

Greg, it's a soviet made mirror lens for camera. I'll take a picture of it and place it later on.

[KevinBarrett]

Excellent moon capture! After reading this and the telescope mount thread, I may just have to find the adapting equipment to mount my camera body to my 8" reflector. Some calculations are in order, I think, to determine focal length and whatnot.

[Dr. Harout]

First of all I've changed my avatar to a better one rhyming with my degree

Second, as I promised I'm attaching pictures of the MTO 1000 AM 1100mm f/10.5 lens

As you may notice it has a built in hood.

[Dr. Harout]

Thanks Don

[Greg Beetham]

Sorry Doc, I was having a wild guess, I didn't recognize the brand of lens but excellent optics though.

Kevin, I've often thought of doing the same with my scope, but just for the moon, mars, saturn and jupiter, they are nice and bright and can be seen through the viewfinder of a camera, (when it comes to deep sky items like nebula, galaxies and clusters, things get really tough as you need a tracking mount on the scope for the photo stacks, preferably a go-to, as they are so faint you can't see them in the viewfinder and thus know where too aim the scope, so I've always thought, I'll leave that kind of astrophotography too the experts).
Have a look at this site if you like, it's got some good advice on accessories etc.
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/ACCESSOR.HTM
Greg

[KevinBarrett]

Oh, my 8" reflector is homemade, on a dobsonian mount, and probably not of good enough optics to do photography. Doing long astrophotography isn't an option with that kit at all, but I do have a 4.5" Orion reflector with the appropriate mount, though it's my wife's really and I don't know about its condition. I'll have to go try it out and see if everything is in working order. Thankfully, they use the same eyepieces.

[Greg Beetham]

Yep that's all mine is, a dob also, but you can do some brilliant moon shots on a dob, as you know the moon is so bright you can use fast shutter speeds on it so you don't have too worry about tracking per se, I personally haven't done so yet though, but we did do an experiment one night, we pre-aimed the moon in advance of it passing through the eyepiece (Nagler 12 I think it was) and then aimed a moviecam at the eyepiece, the result was amazing, it could see detail I couldn't see with the eye looking through the eyepiece, as the surface of the moon passed through the field of view.
A friend (with a 16") has been bitten with the astrophotography bug, is building a tracking mount for it and I'm helping with the machining of various bits and peices...should be interesting....we had a look at Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune (as well as deep sky stuff) last time we went observing about a month ago, Jupiter's red spot was prominent again, Uranus was a small blue blob, and Neptune was a tiny blue blob....and space is vast...
Greg

[KevinBarrett]

16" with a tracking mount... mmmmmmmmmm telescope envy.