Nikon Coolpix and Astronomy

This had LOTS of drawbacks; mainly it was very difficult to align them; it took at least 5 minutes of looking thru the camera's monitor to align them properly, and then the scope DRIFTS, so you have to keep correcting the location of the second tripod. It was a mess.

I eventually got the telescope and coolpix hooked up together in TWO different ways. Here is how:

• Buy a T adaptor from CKC-Power. This is a tiny adaptor that allows you to attach your Coolpix to either a Meade Vari-Extender , OR to a Digi-T adaptor; so you need it regardless of which method you go for.
• METHOD 1:  Buy a MEADE VARI-EXTENDER - this is a tube that you can make longer or shorter.  Use something like a cut-off 35mm film canister to pad its inside, insert an eyepiece smack against the end where the camera goes. Insert other end to the telescope!
• METHOD 2: If you have a suitable eyepiece (of the 5 eyepieces I have, only one worked) for a Digi-T adaptor, buy a Digi-T (from CKC-Power perhaps). You still need the T-adaptor. This is the preferred method at the whole thing becomes shorter and much lighter.

• Nikon's cable shutter release; $100 or so (ouch). It's an electronic shutter release; with an LCD display (wow :) I have one for sale right now, if you'd like. it can also take 'x' number of pictures at one go too, at regular intervals.
• A method for Video-In into your PC/laptop so you can connect coolpix's Video Out cable to it. I bought an Aver Media TV thing. It connects via USB to your PC or laptop, and allows you to watch TV  -or- via video in. I am yet to use this thing for watching TV, but its Video In connector works great with Coolpix. You can focus and aim, looking at the laptop instead of Coolpix's dinky LCD display.
• Counterweights! The back of the scope gets pretty heavy with the Coolpix; you'll need some kinda counterweight for the front of your scope.

It seemed best to use the manual exposure settings, and dictate the exposure manually, otherwise the camera would average the exposure, ending up with very dark images. Most images were done with 1/4 to 1 second exposures. Diaphragm open as wide as possible, of course.

The eyepiece I picked was University Optics Ortho 12mm; except for the moon pictures. The moon pictures were done using Celestron Plossl 32mm, with gray/green filter. Only with Plossl, I was better off using the Autofocus. For the other pictures, I used the Infinity focus setting.

For the Orion Nebula shot, I used the B setting to specify the exposure myself. It was almost a full moon, but I could see the nebula when I looked thru the eyepiece of the telescope. nevertheless, I can't see it at all in my pictures.  As Nikon's manual states, you get noise in the B mode after about 15 seconds of exposure. In theory, the exposure can go up to 1 minute, but after 30 seconds, it seems to "create its own stars" - or that's how it seemed. So I did not try a full 1 minute exposure.

One of the neat things was the digital zoom feature. Without sacrificing too much contrast, digital zoom allowed me to zoom into Jupiter and Saturn a bit better. Otherwise, no editing was done on these pictures.

Ok, on with the pics (I used a rather low-res mode of the camera..) Click on any to view it full-screen.
 

Summary:

It works great on planets; but I was not able to take  deep-sky pictures, like Nebulas and Galaxies. The background noise build-up is considerable, but presumably removable with a dark-frame subtraction.  Perhaps images can be stacked and the background noise in each be removed with dark-frame subtraction.  I just did not know too much about image processing when I connected coolpix to the telescope.  Perhaps if I did, I could have had better luck at deep-sky pictures.
I eventually went and got a MX7-C from Starlight Express.