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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

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  1. J

    Big Big Scopes

    Yes, it does have interchangable eyepieces. It uses the standard 1.25" astronomical eyepiece. I'd suggest staying at around 20x. But that is going to be hard since the scope has a relatively long focal length. I'm pretty sure mine is 800mm without using a mirror finder. But I've read that...
  2. J

    Need advice Mak-Cas scope

    Yes, it should work fine. Though I'd recommend a Rubinar lens instead for overall quality of image. The LOMO 70 will be more "turn key" though and will do well at moderate magnifications and is nice and compact. The biggest negative for the LOMO 70 is that the set screw that holds the...
  3. J

    Entry into digiscoping.....

    Gosh - I almost missed something that I consider very important. For digiscoping - especially with the C7070 - I strongly recomment the STS version and not the angled version. The straight version will be much easier to use for sighting in the bird and then photographing. The angle version...
  4. J

    Entry into digiscoping.....

    I'm not familiar with the tripod and head, but the rest should work about as well as anything. And yes, a cable release is recommended. This is the one I made for my C7070. I use a hot-shoe to plain-shoe flash adapter as a base to bolt a bent strip of 1/8" aluminum. The shutter release...
  5. J

    New Canon Powershot A620 camera

    1) The lower resolution may be a negative for focusing, but I don't see it affecting composition much. 2) If it is using the same sensor as the one in the Olympus C7070, this would probably be a positive, not a negative. The C7070 delivers sharper and higher resolution pictures than my 2/3" 5Mp...
  6. J

    Nikon coolpix S4

    Yeah - it sounds like a decent enought general purpose camera. But I don't have a lot of hopes for it for digiscoping.
  7. J

    Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1

    Width of the front lens element is not a cause of vignetting. In fact, having a larger aperture can be a benefit when you have a less than ideal entrance pupil location in a lens. The main issue with this lens is the larger, high resolution sensor and the 5x zoom range. The 5x range means the...
  8. J

    Nikon coolpix S4

    All indications are that this is a constant f/3.5 lens. Since this is not particularly fast and since the sensor is a very small 1/2.5" size, this doesn't seem that surprising. F/3.5 is perfectly adequate for most digiscoping since most rigs operating at 2000mm equivalent and beyond can deliver...
  9. J

    Celestron C90 Mak

    Yes. That is essentially what I meant. You could conceivably switch back and forth from visual use to camera use by just flipping the mirror. I haven't tried it, but I find the idea interesting. I am so used to photographing with a reversed and inverted image, that having the image inverted...
  10. J

    Why Digiscope?

    If you go with some digiscoping gear, get it and practice before going. The greater focal length equivalence of digiscoping means you must take extra care with vibration etc. "Shooting" at 2000mm vs. 600mm equivalences is a big difference. You will want to get some idea of the gear's...
  11. J

    Why Digiscope?

    If you are going to carry the scope with you anyway, then digiscoping is a pretty easy choice. If not, then the question comes down to how much magnification you need/want (or how close it is that you can get to your subject). A DSLR with a very good or excellent lens (expensive) will...
  12. J

    Nikon DigiScope 7.1 PRO Package

    I haven't use this setup, but I'll give my general thoughts from using other equipment. 1) I'm not a fan of angled scopes for digiscoping. It places the camera significantly off the scope's line of sight and I find myself constantly moving my head from a position good for sighting to one for...
  13. J

    What are the most important camera features

    A few counter points on some specific areas. The narrowness of the camera lens is not a factor in vignetting. The usual limiting factor is the entrance pupil location for the camera lens. It is true that cameras with large diameter lenses often vignette. But this is because most of these...
  14. J

    Olympus Camedia C-7070 Wide Zoom for digiscoping

    Neils results posted in Yahoo's DigiscopingBirds nudged me in this direction also. My preliminary results are promising, but it does seem that the camera needs a couple more mm of eye relief than the typical Coolpix camera. But the out of camera image quailty is very good and the camera is...
  15. J

    MegaPixels, what's that about????

    Its really not even a good idea to use megapixels to refer to resolution. The relationship isn't that direct. Small sensored cameras deliver somewhat less actual detail per megapixel than do DSLRs (for the most part at least) and different sensor designs such as Fuji's Super CCD and the Foveon...
  16. J

    MegaPixels, what's that about????

    That sounds like the conclusion you might reach if you are only looking at resolution figures. In reality, what accounts for image quality is more complex. Noise, for instance, is also an important factor. Digital cameras deliver much lower noise than even the finest grain film cameras. You...
  17. J

    MegaPixels, what's that about????

    Need? That's hardly the question. The question is how much do I want. And for me, that's about as much as I can get and afford. I like making prints. I especially like making big prints. I don't think a camera can deliver too much resolution. I recently bought a 4x5 view camera because I...
  18. J

    Pixels v focal length

    The focal length is always the same. The multiplication factor refers to the field of view when the lens is mounted on your camera. The cameras with a smaller sensor (APS) like your 300D have the same field of view with your lens at 400mm as a 35mm camera has with a 560mm lens. So for bird...
  19. J

    New Nikon D SLR

    I believe they made some very minor improvements in the D70s, but I understand the main advantage is that the D70s shares some components with the D50, so it is less expensive to manufacture. Nikon really needs an 8Mp camera mostly for marketing purposes since Canon and Olympus have released...
  20. J

    New Camera

    I absolutely love the flip and twist LCD on my CP5000. And like Alan reports, the LCD flips the image when the screen is rotated past a certain point. It would be nice to have the option of having the LCD reverse the normal orientation though since I digiscope without an erecting prism...
  21. J

    d70 getting to 1000mm on a budget.

    This excerpt from a post today by Neil Fifer on the Yahoo Group Digiscoping Birds demonstrates the point. " I've just come back from 4 days in Singapore where I wandered around looking at some of the nature reserves in that tropical city. I was in the field for 12 hours every day. I...
  22. J

    d70 getting to 1000mm on a budget.

    Pixels are not resolution, but there is a very predictable relationship if you first understand the nature of the sensor in question. That is why I included the 70% and 80% factors in my post. I did a survey of a number of cameras as tested by DPReview.com and that was the general grouping...
  23. J

    d70 getting to 1000mm on a budget.

    Well, how many light years exactly? It is very true that good and especially excellent optics on a DSLR will be able to deliver more resolution per image frame than just about any digiscoping setup I can think of. But these same good optics don't have the reach of a good digiscoping rig...
  24. J

    Celestron Mini-Maks, et al

    That's correct about the Maksutov-Gregorian. My 40mm Lomo Captain uses that design. http://www.jayandwanda.com/digiscope/digiscope_calc.html Cats are an inexpensive path to very good optics. Though they tend to give up FOV (as you mentioned) and some image contrast. I think they are well...
  25. J

    Celestron Mini-Maks, et al

    I believe that they do via the use of a 45 degree roof prism. At least all of my catadioptrics work that way. For better image quality, you can use a mirror finder that will erect the image but leave it reversed left-right. And in-between the two, you can use a Porro prism. But these are...
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