"Jeremy Taylor" wrote in message
om...
Hi all,

On a whim I bought a Sony Cybershot p93 whilst in Singapore the other
day. Well, you have to... don't you? This was intended just for
holiday snaps and stuff. Reading through the manual, though, I
discovered it can take shots of up to 30 seconds exposure - and it
does some kind of 'Noise Reduction' processing on the image. Neat.

So I took it out into the garden that night, laid it flat on it's back
and took a few shots.

Impressive results - it was picking up stars down to about mag 6 (and
this is in light polluted West London). I took some 5M pixel shots of
Hercules and it even managed to detect M13.

It takes about 20 seconds to do the processing after the image has
been captured - I guess it's doing some kind of dark frame subtraction
or something. Or perhaps there's a cut down version of Registax in
there!

Clever little camera. Now I've got the idea in my head of hooking it
up to the scope - but how to attach it? It has one of those 'pop out'
lenses that I could clamp to but it also has an auto power off which
folds it back up (and I can't seem to disable this feature). Wouldn't
want it trying to close the lense whilst clamped in the telescope.

Any ideas? Anybody else got one of these things?

Jeremy

I purchased a mounting kit for my digital camera that allowed me to connect
it to the back of the scope and focus on the eyepiece. As for the power off
thing. Does it stay on if plugged into the mains (if it can be)

Normally the power off time can be adjusted so as long as you fiddle with
something on the camera it should stay on.

One other suggestion, use the self timer to trigger the camera when attached
to the camera (unless you have a wireless reomte) that will allow any
vibration to die off before the camera shutter fires.

Martin