For some reason (and I’m not complaining here) but the daughter has developed a fixation for astronomy. Santa was very kind and brought the daughter a large Celestron Astromaster telescope for Christmas and on Christmas night we managed to have a really clear night with a lovely view of Jupiter and four of its moons, plenty of stars and a plane. After that night it rained pretty solidly while in Wales then after we got back to Ipswich but tonight we finally had a clear night. The moon was on the rise about 4ish so as it started to get dark, out came the scope. This was the first chance we had to see the moon and it was a toss up between who was the more excited/giggly out of an eight year old girl or her 33 year old daddy.
We managed to find Jupiter again and I even grabbed my DSLR to try and take some shots after reading in one of our books about jamming it up against the eye piece. Sadly the moon didn’t want to play along and kept moving before I managed to get it focused. Do any of you know how hard it is to focus a telescope, camera and line them up together while wearing glasses? Actually its probably quite hard without glasses.

The following are some of the pictures I managed to get which actually looked faintly moon-like. They are a lot blurry but it takes a bit of experimenting to get it right (fingers crossed)

The best shot was actually the one with the tiny moon in the centre as that was taken on the tripod with a long exposure. Bleedin’ typical.

I’m now looking into ways of attaching the camera to the telescope but one option seems to be rig up a webcam to the back of the scope which works out about £60-£70 cheaper than buying a mount or trying to find a t-mount for my camera. I’m thinking a trip to PC world for a webcam may be in order.