Terrestrial photography with a telescope and DSLR

I setup my 8" Celstron Nexstar with f/6.3 focal reducer and Lumix GH1 to try out some "terrestrial" photography. I picked a public road in Redwood City, CA that has a good view and easy parking nearby. As far as I know this is a public sidewalk here.

Here is a shot with the GH1's stock lens at 14mm. The red squares indicate areas that I will image with the telescope.

Here's the stock lens zoomed all the way out to 140mm. This area is centered on the left red box in the first image.

This image was taken through the telescope and f/6.3 redcuer, so it is effectively 1260mm f/6.3.


This image was taken through the telescope at prime focus 2000mm f/10. Note that with the GH1 crop factor, the field of view here is comparable to 4000mm in standard 35mm SLR terms. Most of the blurriness is coming from air currents and haze. I will try again on a cool, overcast day, and I would expect better resolution. I am also eagerly awaiting my telescope remote-focus project to be completed. It's extremely difficult to achieve perfect focus while touching the telescope's focus knob, so it's possible this photo was taken slightly out of focus.



The distance is about 2.4 miles.



Here is a cluster of antenna across the Bay.

22 miles.

Here's another post of photos that I took many years ago with the same telescope and a Nikon 35mm film camera.
http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2009/09/telescope-magnification.html

I forgot that I even had an eyepiece projection adapter. I'll try it out next time, but I suspect the limiting factor will be air clarity not the telescope optics.