View Through a Telescope

The camera: a cheap Kodak 3.1MP digital with no zoom and very few settings.

Saturn (as if that needs clarifying)

A little work with an image editor (Gamma adjust, greyscale to get rid of the chromatic aberration, and a little unsoft mask to correct for the pixelation at this magnification) and voila, Saturn, with rings and all. With this kind of magnification on the telescope, things move really fast. It was quite hard to line up the object in the eyepiece and then switch to the camera before the planet had drifted out of the field of view.

Venus

Not much that shows this is Venus. Also digitally enhanced in the same fashion as Saturn, the shape of its sphere can be seen in the shadowline.

Jupiter

Again, some digital enhancement to bring out the contrast. The original photo was incredibly dim. In the eyepiece we were able to see five moons in a line, but the camera didn't pick them up at all

Moon

And last but not least, the moon. The original is large, so click for the full size. Here, I didn't do any touchup except a crop. You can see the blue tinge from the chromatic aberration caused by not having the axis of the camera lens aligned exactly with the telescope eyepiece. The telescope had it's moon filter on to limit the amount of light coming in, otherwise we would have been blinded looking in the eyepiece.

To be honest, all of these turned out far better than I thought they would. Maybe I'll jig up an adapter to allow the camera to fit better on the eyepiece and try again when the rain stops and the weather warms up a bit.