We had a day full of clouds, casting eclipse plans into doubt. Then, as the sun set, the clouds rolled away and soon the moon rose to a mostly clear sky.
I dragged the telescope outside and hooked up the camera. Experimenting with all of the pipes, threaded adaptors, and assorted telescope and camera gear I came up with a way to hook the D70 to the telescope without using a camera lens or telescope eyepiece. I've seen some sites refer to this as Afocal and others as Direct Objective. I'll go with the later since the 120mm telescope objective is focused directly on the camera's CCD. Using the telescope's specs it's like a big lens with a 1000mm focal length and a speed of f/8.3
I think this setup produces the clearest images of all. Once the eclipse started I took snapshots every ten minutes, adjusting exposure and iso as needed. Unfortunately just as the Moon's full eclipse approached the clouds moved in and staged their own version. We had a couple fleeting views of an orange blurry thing in the clouds, but that's about it.
The second photo had a thin wisp of clouds starting to obscure it so I played with curves in PS to bring out more contrast. Ted managed to catch the moon a little closer to eclipse and the third photo is his.
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