Moon plus Telescope plus Camera

Ummmmmm chasing the really brilliant photos - or seeing really brilliant images, is a bit of a good obsession. It's healthy, makes you smarter, and you have to temper your enthusiasm and excitement with patience and the practical realities of life. When you can see the moon, through even a relatively low cost ($55) spotting scope, the whole dynamic changes..... Like most of the "pretty good" images are mine, but the really good photos are from bigger earth and spaced based cameras. Earth photos are both having good enough telescopes, very steady, solid mounts, and the better atmospheric conditions. - both at the ground, and up through the atmosphere. This is good. --- https://www.ebay.com/p/1483973066 ------ This is better ------ https://www.ebay.com/itm/231705368718 ------- The spotting scopes are brilliant, they have excellent magnification, they are reasonably rugged, and very portable.... - BUT beyond this, you really need to start researching different types of lenses, telescopes, recommendations and fit for purpose units. Also rigidity in the mounts becomes a real issue. Having the telescope blowing around, so the ends move by 1/10th of a millimeter, becomes 100,000 Km of jiggling at 50 million kilometers. Starting at the lower price point and thinking how to improve things and why, makes you smarter, than throwing lots of money at things that are already sorted out. Plus compromises and work arounds need to be made, because a very portable telescope with cheap mounts, can still produce great pictures, compared to a very big and expensive and heavy telescope that is hard to move, if you strap it to a steel flywheel from a car motor, and put it on a solid picnic table in a national park.... There are issues of light pollution, air turbulence, etc., and cheap horrible camera mounts for phones, vs a fixed focus digital camera with digital only zoom, and a friend with a lathe and a bit of aluminium and some rubber o rings etc.

And there are issues of camera optics and light amplification and sensitivity. The CMOS chip, has an infrared filter over it, AND they are brilliant all around cameras, but the cameras that have really big light chips, with very high densities, and manually programmable operating systems than can give very long exposure times, all start to make this a bit more complex. Also scopes can need tracking systems for long exposure times, as the earth rotates once (360* degrees) every 24 hours, So If you point your scope and it's camera at a planet, for 10 minutes, that is 24 hours x 60 minutes = 1440 minutes -: 10 = 14.4 degrees. Your camera - if it does not have tracking - the planet has moved kinf of totally out of view. See if you can join an astronomy club and try the telescopes at a few facilities like the universities, the clubs and the big deep space observatories.

And with very low light levels -aim for contrast by going to the darkest areas you can find, as the street lighting, bouncing back into the atmosphere and hitting the pollution and dust etc., makes the light level of the air much brighter, compared to the dim object in the nigh sky.

The first ever proper galaxy I saw with the spotting scope was the Orion Nebula. There is a row of three bright stars, that depending where you are and can see, well in this picture, the slope at 45*, down, to the left. And just below the middle bright star, is a vertical row of smaller stars - the center star is a full colour galaxy composed of two stars and various gasses and dusts and all that - and yes you can see the spiral arms of the galaxy and it's in colour.... This is about the optical limits of a good cheap $55 Ebay spotting scope, in a dark area, on a clear windless night. . BUT once you start to jump up in light gathering power (Galactic cannon sized telescopes) and magnification, you automatically go from a handful of easy to see stars in the night sky, to BILLIONS OF THEM.... https://cdn.britannica.com/09/....91709-004-E9516081.j

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U17....j3SmG958/URKsAMe27xI

@Life_N_Times_of_Shane_T_Hanson: Where did you take the photo? Somewhere in the remote part of Australia?

------ https://youtu.be/KisnvqtWU5A ----- https://youtu.be/Xc1v6BjHm8U ------- and the James Webb telescope images. ------ https://youtu.be/SjuklIOsz44 -----