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| Astrophotography Using a Camcorder |
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| I made this image of the Sun by pointing my
camcorder into the eyepiece of my telescope. It's my first attempt
at afocal astrophotography using a hand-held video camera, what a few amateur astronomers
are calling astrovideography. Don't try this at home, meaning point anything at the Sun, including your naked eye, unless you have the right equipment for solar observing. The eyepiece I used was my 32mm Plössl. I suspect Plössls aren't the best design for this, since there are others with greater eye relief and apparent field of view, but I don't happen to own any. The tape mechanism no longer works in my 8-year-old Sony CCD-F301 Handycam, so I had to drag a lot of extra stuff out onto the deck. The remoteness of the tape control and all the extra cabling made the procedure a lot more complicated than it had to be. |
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I turned off the autofocus, set the zoom to the widest field (8.5mm focal length), and since it seemed to help with the excessive central brightness of the image (although not enough), I set the shutter speed to 1/4000 sec., its fastest setting. I blocked stray light by draping a jacket over the eyepiece and the camera. I later grabbed this frame from the tape using Play's Snappy video capture gizmo. Compare this image to an image taken from space at about the same time by SOHO. (My image is flipped both top to bottom and left to right, the effect of the mirrors and eyepiece orientation in a Newtonian.) You can also check SpaceWeather.com for current images and information about solar activity. Rod Mollise, a regular on sci.astro.amateur, has a page about camcorder astrophotography, including some great images of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. |
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