Donnie's Astrophotography

June 19, 2002

Today I received my brand-new MaxView 40 eyepiece from ScopeTronix! This eyepiece was supposed to eliminate all of the vignetting problems I had encountered with the Canon PowerShot G2 camera, and boy did it ever live up to its claims! I was very pleased; I finally got some good photos using my digital camera.

Unfortunately, visibility was pretty poor on this night. There was a lot of haze - some sort of marine layer or something like that was really reducing visibility, and I could pretty much only see the moon from my back yard; that and maybe one or two of the brightest stars. Pretty crummy visibility. But, I had to try out the new eyepiece, and I got some pretty great photos of the moon. Here they are!

Given that the MaxView 40 is a 40mm eyepiece, the effective magnification is 50x on my (2000mm focal-length) telescope. The Canon PowerShot G2 has a 3x optical zoom, which gives up to 150x total magnification. Any further magnification will require a Barlow lens, but that can yield between 300x and 450x magnification, which is probably about the most that one might ever need. I'm very pleased with this eyepiece; it gives me the ability to image the full sun or moon, AND zoom in as tightly as I might ever want. In combination with other appropriate accessories, you really have an amazing amount of flexibility with this eyepiece!

The major lesson of the night is that focusing the telescope on the digital-camera LCD is not terribly accurate. I need to come up with a better way to do this. Also, I suspect I could improve my image quality by filtering these images, but I haven't played with that too terribly much as yet.

On to the photos!

	Waxing gibbous moon. Canon PowerShot G2 Eyepiece-projection photography with the MaxView 40 eyepiece.
	Closer photo of the top part of the moon, using G2's optical zoom to achieve somewhere between 100x and 150x magnification. Canon PowerShot G2 Eyepiece-projection photography with the MaxView 40 eyepiece.
	Closer photo of the bottom part of the moon, using G2's optical zoom to achieve somewhere between 100x and 150x magnification. Canon PowerShot G2 Eyepiece-projection photography with the MaxView 40 eyepiece.