I (Joe Roberts) had some film to finish up in a camera, so I decided to finish it up on the Moon using the Meade 4500 reflector ( a 4.5" F8 telescope). I used the afocal method to take a number of shots of the first quarter Moon. The film was Kodak Gold 200; I had a Meade MA 25mm eyepiece in the telescope. The afocal method is basically "hold the camera up to the eyepiece and 'snap' a picture". I did use a tripod to hold the camera steady however. I let the camera select the shutter speed because the Moon filled most of the field (camera light meters work reasonably well if the Moon more or less fills the field of view).
When I got the photos back (from a one hour place), there were 5 or 6 fairly good shots (many of them were nearly the same). I scanned the images; the close up view of the Moon below is from the same print (I just set the scan resolution to a higher setting). I used Aldus Photostyler to process the scanned images (I did the processing with the images in the TIFF format, then I later converted them to JPEG). I did some more tinkering; after adjusting the tonal balance I split the color images into RGB components. Upon doing this, I noticed that the blue image (which is now a B+W image) showed considerably more detail than the red or green component image. I then saved the "blue" image as my new image (so the final image is B+W, but it represents the blue component of the original). So, the images below are the result of a fair amount of manipulation. The image started on film, was printed to paper, scanned to digital format, and then digitally processed. All in all, the final results show that some very nice images of the Moon can be obtained with a very modest telescope!
Photos taken 1 August 1998.
