[Leica] Super Moon through APO Televid 82

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

As an amateur astronomer who has tried to get photos that faithfully 
represent what's seen through the eyepiece, I'd say that the image you 
posted is not bad at all for a single image taken with an 82-mm objective. 
For comparison, here's a single image of the same Moon with a Canon DSLR 
through an astronomical telescope of three times the aperture of the 
Televid, yet it's inferior to yours: 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurie_astronomy/14665188023/

Do you mean that the visual appearance through the Televid was much sharper? 
That's very typical and is due to the fact that an astronomical object is 
always viewed through a turbulent, boiling atmosphere that the human visual 
mechanism compensates for, both by integrating the image over time and by 
being abe to see momentarily sharp details. The best images of the Moon and 
planets invariably come using specialty software that examines huge numbers, 
hundreds to thousands, of individual video frames taken at prime focus (as 
you did, with no eyepiece or camera lens) with either a cheap webcam or a 
somewhat more expensive several-Mpx "planetary camera" (that still costs 
less than the leather case for the Televid!), selects the best images (whose 
details in hundreds of points across the image deviate the least from the 
mean positions of the details), derives from them a consensus image using 
the mean position of each detail, and applies mathematical routines to 
"deconvolute" the details to partially compensate for residual smearing. 

Or do you mean that the image looks better on your monitor right out of the 
camera than off the Gallery? When viewed large, your Gallery image seems to 
have a peculiar graininess, almost pointillistic, and I wonder whether it 
would look better if it were uploaded with less compression and size 
reduction.

If I have favorable conditions here tonight, I'll try to get a single image 
with my 155-mm apo refractor and post it.

?howard


On Jul 13, 2014, at 4:29 PM, Jim Laurel <jplaurel at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/jplaure/landscape/Super+Moon.jpg.html
> 
> Here?s a shot of last night?s super moon as seen from the Seattle area. 
> Captured with an Olympus OMD E-M1 through a Leica APO Televid 82 using the 
> Leica DSLR Photo Adapter. This is not digiscoping in the typical sense, 
> where you take a photo through the scope?s eyepiece. The Leica SLR Photo 
> Adapter replaces the eyepiece and provides a T-mount that you can use to 
> adapt almost any lens mount. In this case, a T to m4/3 adapter. With the 
> APO Televid 82, the adapter provides the equivalent of an 800mm lens. On a 
> Micro 4/3 camera, it yields a 1600mm equivalent field of view.
> 
> The image is actually a lot sharper than it appears on the LUG Gallery. I 
> don?t know why it looks so soft there.
> 
> Here is a link to the DLSR Photo Adapter on the Leica site.
> 
> http://us.leica-camera.com/Sport-Optics/Technical-Equipment/Sport-Optics-Technical-Equipment/DSLR-Photo-Adapter
> 
> 
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