2006-05-05

Being silly with the 905 and a mobile phone

Had another enjoyable observing session tonight until cloud stopped play. The Moon was pretty much washing out the sky so I failed to observe the comet but I did spend quite a lot of time observing the Moon (the log will probably go online early next week). At one point earlier on in the session and while the sky was still quite light, I grabbed my mobile phone and took a couple of images through the eyepiece. The first, with (if I recall correctly) the 15mm eyepiece in place, was of the whole moon:


Given that it was hand-held at the eyepiece and given that the camera in the phone (a Nokia 6280) isn't that good the image turned out better than expected (and better than the handful that I deleted at the time).

Also, just for fun, I dropped the 6mm eyepiece into the 'scope and tried a closeup on the region around Ptolemaeus:


This one's not so good but the craters are recognisable when compared to a map.

I'm going to have to crack at some point in the near future and start to play with a webcam or something.

3 comments:

Tag said...

It first struck me as a likeness of Galileo's lunar drawing - but yours is actually better. I also like how you captured the symmetry of the triplets Ptolemaeus & Co and Purbach & Co.

peter

Ian Musgrave said...

Now that is a cute trick! I works better than me sticking my digital camrea next to the lens!

Dave Pearson said...

Thanks for your kind words Peter, Ian and Nick.

That USNO link looks interesting Nick, thanks for that.

I can't help thinking now that there's got to be a market for some sort of universal camera/phone adaptor to hold the camera still. Or I could stop mucking about and sort out a proper imaging setup. ;)