Finally went and bought a *real* camera, a Nikon D5000. At about $600, it’s at the low end of Good Camera prices. I spent today tinkering… and tonight taking test shots of the night sky. It has built-in long exposure settings up to 30 seconds. Here are a few early results:
The first two show the Milky Way and the skyglow of Ogden/Salt Lake City.
These two also show the Milky Way and skyglow… but up in the upper right corner I lucked out and caught three satellites zipping along.
Milky Way:
The last one is the least interesting to look at but in a way the most interesting in what it shows. It’s a shot of Jupiter, with an overexposed circualr disk of Jupiter visible, along with at least two moons visible. Niftily, just above and to the left of Jupiter is a blue-green speck… Neptune. I’ve never seen Neptune through a telescope before… and here it is visible via the standard lens that came with the camera.
A zoom lens is on order. It’ll be interesting to see what I can see with that.
5 Responses to “Improved tech = improved results. Who knew?”
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The lens is everything. The difference between a (retail) $200 and a $1000 lens is amazing. There are some really high end SLR lenses out there (I’m a fan of Leica) that you can get cheap and can mount with an adapter. You lose any autofocus capability, but the difference in clarity can be astounding.
caught a disk of Jupiter ? Not bad for $600
They say, of course, it’s the photographer, not the camera, however….
Excellent results!, especially capturing Neptune along with Jupiter,
I particularly like the second shot down, the Milky Way looks almost 3-D,
like smoke from a forest fire.
What zoom lens you waiting for? A word of caution; modern zoom lenses contain a lot of glass, which means more light loss, unfortunatley, fast fixed=length lenses are better for this work, if hellishly expensive.
Very nice. I’ve been thinking starting with this next year as well, when I buy an EOS 50D. I’m an old EOS user and have plenty of lenses still, so I stick with Canon.
I’m really wondering how the view of this would be from alpine areas above 1,500 meters. I remember it being magnificent, but that was without camera and zoom lense.
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