Use an adaptor to easily connect your SLR to a telescope.
You may be wondering why anyone would even want to attach an SLR camera to a telescope, given that the two are fundamentally different kinds of optical instruments. But if you are a birder, you might be familiar with the term digiscoping, which refers to exactly this procedure. The reason to do digiscoping is that by attaching your everyday SLR camera to a spotting scope (a low powered telescope frequently used by birders), you can get stunning close-up photographs of birds that rival images you might otherwise only get with very expensive cameras and zoom lenses.
Instructions
1. Mount the telescope on a tripod for stability, and hold the camera lens directly up against to the telescope eyepiece. While this may seem a very crude way of connecting an SLR to a telescope, it can be surprisingly effective once you get some practice with holding the camera steady and lining up the lens properly with the telescope eyepiece. It is also the cheapest technique as it requires no extra equipment.
2. Use a telescope with an eyepiece that is angled upwards to make it easy to manually align the camera with the telescope. That way you can point the camera downward, making it easy to hold the camera steady compared with trying to align its lens with a horizontal eyepiece.
3. Cut out the top of a plastic bottle cap to make a ring, and glue it to the eyepiece of the telescope. You can now hold up the lens of your camera against the ring without worrying that it will get damaged by scraping against the eyepiece. This is a cheap and effective digiscoping technique commonly used by bird photographers.
4. Use a commercial digiscoping adaptor. Such an adaptor consists of two metal rings, one of which can be threaded to the telescope eyepiece and the other to the camera lens. The two pieces can be easily mated together to connect the eyepiece and the camera lens. However, to be effective your camera must have a threaded port for the adaptor to screw onto.
5. Use a pivot mount for your camera. A pivot mount attaches to the base of your camera and can be mounted onto the tripod of your telescope. It allows you to quickly swivel your camera into position behind the telescope eyepiece when you want to take a digiscoped photo, and to swivel the camera out of the way when you want to use your telescope to watch birds.
Tags: your camera, telescope eyepiece, camera lens, your telescope, camera steady