This is five shots taken with my *ist DL2 on my Dads 8" F5 Newtonian, stacked using Registax and sharpened a bit in Photoplus. I was pretty pleased with the outcome

Thats f*kin excellent  

Hopefully in the next few days I will have my adaptor tube in order to turn my Panasonic FZ20 F/36-432 into a 950mm equivalent

Wont produce pics as good as that but Im interested to see how close it gets.

thanks guys

I mount the camera using a T-mount adaptor where the eyepiece would normally go on a newtonian astro-scope (a Celestron C-8N to be exact). Even at 1000mm I still had to do some cropping, Im going to try again sometime soon with a 2x TC for 2000mm (3000mm 35mm equivalent). At that focal length the moon fills the frame with no cropping. I have a couple of frames at 2000mm already, but not enough for the stacking I used here so this one ended up less noisy.

This summers project for Dad and I is to get a webcam rigged to the scope. You might think that a DSLR would be better, but with a webcam you can get 30FPS which is ideal for stacking when you dont have motor drives. Hoping to get some nice pics of Jupiter and Saturn when its all up and running.

The trick when shooting the moon is to remember that while you are in darkness, the moon itself is in direct sunlight. Unless you have a very long lens your meter will get confused by the bright moon in a dark sky, so shoot in manual unless you are using at least 1000mm. Start from the good old Sunny 16 rule. That is, at Apperture F16 a shutter speed of 1/ISO will give good exposure for a subject in bright sunlight. Now there is a lot of atmosphere between us and the moon so you usually need to boost this exposure a little, say to F11 or F8 and 1/ISO, but it works pretty well.

Also the moon moves pretty fast so try and keep your shutter speed above 1/100th.

your in luck, we have night errrrrr every night !!  

Awesome photo.

Nows a good time to be observing Jupiter too, the great red spot is colliding with another huge storm on its surface.

chuck it in bulb mode mate. should do fine then.

There is another problem with digital SLRs attached to telescopes, quite simply the sensor gets warm on long exposures which can cause some noise, it needs cooling. Some have switched the camera off until the last possible moment and again between shots which supposedly gives a better result. Might be better to use a webcam and mod it to keep it cold.

Problem then though is that the resolution isnt as good, usually 1.3 megapixels and the lens will be poor. Better off removing the lens and using the telescope eyepiece. A proper camera for use with a telescope was expensive last time I looked at a price but might have improved.