Hi Guys, I hope some one can help me out , I am trying to add a dslr to a telescope = "Sharpstar 76EDPH Triplet, 76mm diameter, 418mm focal length = f/5.5
I have attached the Nikon, but all I get is fuzzy over exposed, out of focus, crap put simply.
What am I doing wrong? this is driving me bonkers, to add to the mix, my camera is showing F3.5 cannot be adjusted. I was expecting F5.5…
PS Jupiter was my target.
Many thanx in advance…
Maybe I can shed some light into this.
First, planets are usually recorded on video, then the best frames stacked and only after that, process the resulting image. If you are trying to take a single photograph, most likely you’ll see everything quite blurry due to the turbulence in the atmosphere (“seeing” conditions) even if your focus is perfect.
Second, 418mm focal length is probably not enough for planets. I’ve tried Jupiter with my full frame Nikon on a 600mm lens and it was tiny. Good planet images usually require a lot of magnification/focal length, so you’ll probably struggle quite a bit to get good images/videos of planets without any extra magnification (you may need to add a 3x or 5x barlow).
Third, I suggest first focusing on stars, which is much easier than planets (turbulence again). If you can get a Bahtinov mask for your telescope diameter, much better. You can set it up, point at a star, adjust focus, get it perfect and then remove the mask making sure the focus is knob is not moving. This way you’ll make sure you are in focus before actually pointing to Jupiter and if you keep seeing it blurry you’ll be certain it’s not because of focus.
And last, but not least, if you can’t get anything on the sky on focus, it may be a problem of not enough (or too much!) distance between the telescope and your camera sensor. You might need to try getting it a bit farther away - there are cheap extension tubes for this.
I hope this helps! Let us know the results 