I had some fun today taking these images of the Sun and Moon with just my camera and lens set up.
I used a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens plus a 2x telecoverter with a glass solar filter safely attached to the front of the lens, this made for a focal length of 1280mm, the camera was attached to a tracking HEQ5 mount.
 
I already had the tracking mount setup when I took some image earlier in the day with my solar telescope, and I thought…Hmmm, why not put my camera on the mount and track the sky, all I did was take the adapter bracket off the bottom of the Lunt solar scope and attached to the bottom of the Canon 70D camera and presto,
​I was on my way :-)
 
You can just make out the sunspot group AR2715 on the surface of the Sun and the Moon is in a waxing gibbous phase, during the evening I used the same lens at 18mm and took a wide field photo of Jupiter above the Moon with the constellation of Scorpius rising in the east…by this time the sky was very light from the Moon, but the scene looked very pretty in the night sky.
 
So how did I take the pictures, for both the Sun and the Moon images I did a burst of 20 images then stacked them in RegiStax6 and lightly processed them in PS CS4. The exposures for both objects is very short, the Sun 1/500th second and the Moon 1/250th second and ISO100 or ISO200.

These photos do really show that you can get some great astrophotography images even if you don’t have an expensive telescope. You can still take really good shots of both the Sun and Moon with just an ordinary camera tripod, but having a tracking mount like the one mentioned above does make it so much easier to take images.

The Sun has been so quite visually for a long now, so when a sunspot emerges everyone is excited, unfortunately its been cloudy here so this is the first time I’ve been able to get the solar scope out to take some pictures, to add to this, we have a bit of smoke in the sky from some burning off, so the sky’s a bit hazy…
 
I was hoping to catch a solar prominence from AR2713 as it hit the western limb of the Sun, but that did not happen and the larger sunspot group AR2715 seems to be getting smaller. While taking this image AR2715 brightened slightly and if you look closely at the shape of the sunspot you can see a pretty heart shape…that heart shape sunspot is larger than our planet Earth!
 
Image taken a with a H-alpha Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC-S CCD camera at prime focus, AVI file stacked in RegisStax6 and processed in PS CS4 :-)

The western sky was so pretty yesterday afternoon with the new crescent Moon and the planet Venus shinning brilliantly beside one another for a close conjunction on the 16th June 2018.
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My Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a tripod. First image ISO1600 lens set at 25mm and exposure time was half a second, second image lens set at 117mm, ISO6400 exposure time 1/6th second exposure :-)

Beautiful Earthshine on the surface of the Moon, sometimes it can be very hard to capture but not tonight…it looked so beautiful here at my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn.

Again, a lot of the time you don’t need a telescope to capture the beauty of the night sky, just grab your camera and lenses and take the pictures, I do ;-)

Jupiter always looks stunning in the night sky and on the evening of the 16th June at 9.45pm the Great Red Spot rotated into view for me to capture some images to make this picture :-)
 
Images were taken at my Stardust Observatory using the 10inch Meade LX200 Schmidt-cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC-S CCD camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached. I captured an AVI movie file and stacked 1800 images together in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.