Home >> Science & Nature >> Astronomy

How to Connect a D80 to a Telescope

Attaching a Nikon D80 digital camera to a telescope enables the telescope to act as a camera lens, greatly increasing magnification. This allows you to take striking photographs of the moon, planets and deep-sky objects such as star clusters, nebulae and comets. The "bulb" setting on the D80 allows long-exposure photographs that can last from minutes to hours, allowing you to capture faint objects not visible to the eye (even when looking through the telescope). Attaching a lens adapter to the telescope, re-balancing the telescope and then tracking the moving sky during exposure will produce startling photographs.

Instructions

- 1
  Remove any attached lens from the camera and attach a telescope lens adapter to the Nikon D80 in the same manner that you would attach a camera lens. Ensure that the lens adapter is specifically for the Nikon camera series since each camera manufacture has different attachment configurations.
- 2
  Remove any eye piece from the telescope and attach the telescope lens adapter with the camera connected (The telescope lens adapter screws onto the draw tube, where the eye piece was attached) . Re-balance the telescope since the added weight of the camera will cause the telescope to sag.
- 3
  Use the viewfinder on the camera as the telescope eye piece and focus the view using the telescope focusing knob, in the same manner that you would focus if you were using only the telescope's eye piece. The camera's auto focus feature won't work when a telescope is attached.
- 4
  Set the D80 exposure mode to "Manual (M)." Set the ISO (sensor sensitivity) to "400." The aperture adjustments won't work when using a telescope so ignore f-stops. Depending on the brightness of the subject, set your shutter speed for a proper exposure. The moon is bright and will register on the internal light meter but deep-sky objects are so faint they will not. Take a few photographs, decreasing the shutter speed every few shots until it reaches 30 seconds.
- 5
  Use the "bulb" setting and an electronic shutter release cable for exposures lasting more than 30 seconds (30 seconds is the maximum programmable shutter speed on the D80). When using the bulb setting and a cable release, exposures are limited only by the camera batteries. Exposures of several hours are possible.

Astronomy