Peter Berry

A pretty fantastic shot from only 2000mm EFL, and takes excellent scope optics. ?The Russian Astro Rubinar 1000mm f/10?

Andrew, the problem with a much larger sensor than the tiny video chips of yore is that you have to use a significant zoom lens on the camera (or a long FL prime) to couple to the scope eyepiece/TC train. I've tried my GH4 w/ the compact Panny 14-140, but just too bulky, with a relatively small circular image shown, or no focus-able image all. My next iteration was the Sony HC1 FHD camcorder, but never found suitable astronomic "seeing" to warrant the time and effort of setup with the 9.25" f/10 scope. What I have done with it is total solar eclipse recording of solar flares and detached prominences, but with a very compact and excellent 4" 1000mm f/10 reflex scope w/ tube length only 8" using an eyepiece coupled to the Sony lens, but no TC. First pic below with the VGA res. TRV-900 of the striking detached prominence - Africa '01; the second with the FHD Sony of the "hedgerow prominences" I've not seen imaged in this detail - Turkey '06. For the recent eclipse I viewed and imaged from Madras, Oregon, I used my GH5, Canon 100-400-II w/ 2X TC shooting 4K in ETC crop mode (2.7X crop factor), plus 2X dig zoom or this to 1080p res and 5.4X factor = 4320mm EFL. Tech. screwups on my part nixed any views of the pretty unimpressive flares at this mag.

Here's a sort of uber-imaging setup with a 9.25" aperture/2350mm f/10 Schmidt-Cassegraine compound scope with an afocal imaging setup about 15 years ago: Sony TRV-900 3-CCD VHF camcorder with full man. controls, SS down to 1/2 sec connected to a telescope eyepiece (this is the "afocal" setup) which is connected to a 3X TC (Barlow lens in astro lingo). The Jupiter images filled about 2/3 frame height with the Sony at about 10X zoom. This method makes finding the object pretty easy zoomed out, works well in spite of the huge # of optical elements involved, and zoomed-in gives enormous mag. - maybe ~ 20-25 meters EFL @ f/100? The film clips were processed in Registax, which selected the sharpest (due to brief reductions in atmospheric turbulence), stacked 400-600, which accentuated common detail features, than a complex multistage "wavelet" sharpening routine. The first Jupiter image was from the steadiest "seeing" conditions I've ever had - in the Florida Panhandle. The Mars image at it's historic closest approach in 9/3/03, from southern Mexico.