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ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY CAMERAS AND PRIME FOCUS PHOTOGRAPHY

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Using a camera with it's own low magnification lens mounted on top of the telescope allows exposures of a few minutes and little inaccuracy in tracking the objects to give wide field images of the Milky Way in all it's brilliant colours. Images will appear on the film which cannot be seen with the naked eye because there is not enough light for us to see them, let alone in colour.

When mounting a camera onto a telescope which has a equatorial

rebalance

mount, it is very important in astrophotography to

the

telescope because of the extra weight on it. This will make the guiding controls work more smoothly and the make the whole setup more sturdy. Attaching the weight of the camera directly over the top of the center of the mount will evenly distribute the weight better and the use of any extra counter weight will be kept to a minimum. Other ways of

making the telescope more sturdy can be discovered in the

tips.

As mentioned before, the use of more magnification and longer exposures of the film will make astrophotography more difficult. More practise and experience will be needed to track the faster moving objects as they move faster across the smaller field of view caused by the increased magnification. Increased magnification can be achieved

by changing the camera's lens to a longer

focal length,

but the increase

will be minimal compared to using the telescope to gather the light and magnify the objects. Prime Focus Photography Using adapters available, the camera can be attached to the telescope focuser and therefore using the the telescope to produce the images taken by the camera. The length of the telescope is used to magnify the object without any eyepiece and of course the telescope's mirror is used to gather the light. This is called Prime Focus Photography and will give you more magnification than most lenses which fit onto the camera. The two adapters needed to attach the camera to the telescope are firstly a T-mount. The T-mount adapts your brand of camera to the second adapter which slides inside the telescope's focuser instead of the eyepiece. The adapters are available through Telescopes and Astronomy and the second adapter doubles as a 2x

Barlow.

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