TazmanianD
New member
I'm am basically a complete noob to the world of telescopes and telestrial and aerial observations. I recently decide to buy a scope just to mess around with and try a few things. Because I wanted both terrestrial and aerial viewing, I bought a Celestron C5 Spotting Scope that has a 1250mm focal length (which I gather is fairly high for a spotting scope) and exchangable 1.25" eye-pieces.
One of the things I wanted to do was try some videoscoping. I previously messed around with this with a very cheap telescope and a non-video digital camera. I just used the video-out from the camera (the video that shows you the same things that's on the LCD monitor) and it worked great, but the problem is that the camera isn't designed for video so I have no control over the video output and specifically, I can't control the shutter speed or get rid of the display information.
So, I went and bought a relatively cheap camcorder yesterday (JVC GR-D250US) and have discovered that it does not work nearly as great as my digital camera (which works because I can put the lense right up into the eye-piece on the scope). With no zoom, I get pretty significant vignetting if I zoom in a bit, the vignetting increases as the camera lense recesses into the camera and eventually at higher zooms, the vignetting disappears.
Because I've got a relatively powerful scope, this means I can't do any observations at moderately close ranges. With a 40mm eye-piece on the scope (which I don't have yet), I can get a magnification of about 32x but if I have to zoom my camera another 5x to remove the vignetting, that gives me a magnification of 160x which is pretty high.
Did I just get the wrong camcorder or am I going to have this problem with any camcorder because I have a scope with a long focal length? I've read about the various adapters but I'm rather confused. Some of them just mount the camera to the scope, but that won't do me any good because the cam's lense doesn't get close enough to the scope. Are there adapters that can provide some optical solution without magnifying the image? Like I said, I don't really want any more magnification. Perhaps getting an eye-piece with a larger field of view (which is probably more expensive than I want to go)? The cam has a pretty small filter size (27mm) so maybe I should return it and get a camera with a bigger lense.
I would appreciate any thought or comments here.
One of the things I wanted to do was try some videoscoping. I previously messed around with this with a very cheap telescope and a non-video digital camera. I just used the video-out from the camera (the video that shows you the same things that's on the LCD monitor) and it worked great, but the problem is that the camera isn't designed for video so I have no control over the video output and specifically, I can't control the shutter speed or get rid of the display information.
So, I went and bought a relatively cheap camcorder yesterday (JVC GR-D250US) and have discovered that it does not work nearly as great as my digital camera (which works because I can put the lense right up into the eye-piece on the scope). With no zoom, I get pretty significant vignetting if I zoom in a bit, the vignetting increases as the camera lense recesses into the camera and eventually at higher zooms, the vignetting disappears.
Because I've got a relatively powerful scope, this means I can't do any observations at moderately close ranges. With a 40mm eye-piece on the scope (which I don't have yet), I can get a magnification of about 32x but if I have to zoom my camera another 5x to remove the vignetting, that gives me a magnification of 160x which is pretty high.
Did I just get the wrong camcorder or am I going to have this problem with any camcorder because I have a scope with a long focal length? I've read about the various adapters but I'm rather confused. Some of them just mount the camera to the scope, but that won't do me any good because the cam's lense doesn't get close enough to the scope. Are there adapters that can provide some optical solution without magnifying the image? Like I said, I don't really want any more magnification. Perhaps getting an eye-piece with a larger field of view (which is probably more expensive than I want to go)? The cam has a pretty small filter size (27mm) so maybe I should return it and get a camera with a bigger lense.
I would appreciate any thought or comments here.