Star Party Oak Middle School

My uncle Matt invited me to go to "star party" where plenty of grown-ups brought their gigantic telescope to introduce 150 to our outer surroundings:

I wanted to capture the feel during this event with those few big boy toys and the kids lining up to check through the eyepieces.

For this I used my DSLR with a fisheye lens, a tripod and a remote shutter with a timer.

The fisheye lens enabled me to get closer to the subjects and create better composing than if I tried to fit everything in. Compare those two pictures to see what I mean and tell me which one you think is more powerful:

Most of the time, wide-angles and fisheye lenses shouldn't be used to try to fit it all into the frame.
I used the self-timer and the tripod because I wanted to do long exposures. The benefits were that I was able to pull out a lot of details out of those dark scenes (it was night time, duh) and make it look almost like daylight (it's your own preference if you like the style or not) and I was also able to capture the feel of constant movement of people around very still objects:

The other benefit was that since the camera was taking a picture for up to 151 seconds and that it didn't want to be bothered during that time, I was able to play with another device I had brought over:

My uncle helped me build this little device that you attach to the end of a lens to turn it into a telescope. Basically, you buy a 10mm erecting eyepiece (since the lens reproduce the image completely inverted, you need the eyepiece to invert it again so that it looks straight), you drill a big hole in a lens rear cap, you glue a plastic tube to it and you attach the eyepiece to the end of the tube.
In this case, I attached the device to the end of my old 300mm f/2.8 lens, making the lens a x30 scope. The moon fit fully inside the image frame since the eyepiece only allows you to see a small area in the middle of the image circle. You can focus it using the regular lens focus and you can dim or brighten the image by modifying the aperture. This old lens is an extremely sharp lens so the image of the moon seen through it was very very detailed. I got a lot of "wow" reactions when the kids and parents came up to look through it, even after having checked out the other telescopes "I can see so well and it's so small!".
The instructions I followed to make this are at this link.


That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed the reading, stay tuned for more posts later.


Guillaume

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Guillaume