| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
NASA has plenty of great pix that are available in high res for free.
Which makes it all the more enticing Mike!
Why the hell can't we ordinary photographers take photographs like that??? Well NASA has a huge budget and the highest qualified personal to achieve it, thats why.
But surely we can try to get a little of the action, it's a fascinating sphere (I guess that's a pun!). Well we can but it's a very steep learning curve, I looked up the telescope the OP mentions, it's a fairly basic 'scope but with a few mods it can be made to do the job quite well, things like Saturn and Jupiter, moons and near space objects can be viewed and photographed, but not out of the box. I think it can be fitted with a motor drive too.
There are instructions on-line on how to make a motorised polar mount for very little with a few odds and ends bits that are cheaply available.
I would bin the tripod and make a solid welded up frame to mount it much more solidly or here in the UK we have what are known as trig points, concrete pillars on tops of hills and mountains which are used by the ordinance survey to mount their surveying instruments. Some are reasonably accessible and not too far from roads, they would be a good place to mount a telescope which would be very solid and provide a repeatable location. They might even provide a lock-on orientated accurately on North? Just a thought...
Again the OP has failed to give us a clue as to his/her whereabouts... We don't need the house number and street. The county or state, even country would help a lot.
JK, can we not add a little note to the new members signing up pages explaining why it's so much better for members to reveal even a basic location?
____________________
Robert.