Many a telescope owner, after gazing at the sky for a while, wants more; wants to share what she or he is seeing.
There are several ways to achieve this. The most obvious is shooting through the telescope eyepiece with a small camera or cell phone. Since this is very difficult to do hand-held, you can find many economical cellphone adapters on the web (± USD 20).
The other alternative is using the telescope as if it were a long fixed-focal, fixed-aperture lens, mounting a DSLR or mirrorless (CSC) camera sans lens on the telescope focuser.
In this article we explore the different alternatives, tools, pros & cons of both methods.
Eyepiece projection
The advantage of shooting through the eyepiece, so-called eyepiece projection, is that its magnification allows you to get a high enlargement on sky objects.
The disadvantage is that a cell-phone or a point-and-shoot are not great cameras and, moreover, that image quality heavily depends on the optical quality of one’s eyepieces.
If you still use the eyepieces that came bundled with your telescope, you may want to upgrade at least one before venturing into eyepiece projection. Otherwise you are most likely going to get disappointed.
That said, in my research for this article I came across a DSLR adapter for eyepiece projection (USD 150), which could possibly overcome the low IQ issues of cell-phones and point-and-shoot cameras.
However, I have no idea how well it works. Check it out for yourself clicking here.