If anyone liked the 2nd, is this any better? It's not the same shot (it's actually the previous one, but a slightly different angle). No sharpening, though I have fixed the white balance.

Possibly. It was 1/30s at F5.6. The camera was on the tripod, obviously, and I was firing the shots with the remote.

The 3rd shot is unsharpened though, and does look softer than the other two, which have a little USM applied.

Can you be a little more specific?

This one was an experiment. I can't make up my mind whether I like it or not. There's a touch of soft focus at the edges, but the high key effect comes just from overexposing.

I rearranged the furniture a bit, and got Jayne to sit at the scary end of the K10D for a while. I finally persuaded her to let me post some of them, so I'd welcome any critique.

The light is daylight, and the photos are unedited, apart from a bit of cropping, and a trace of levels and USM at times. I probably ought to adjust the white balance a bit, but I'll get around to that in due course.

I'm not. I'm very new to the DSLR world. I can't be the only n00b, surely?

Yes, I understand this. I think I can discount haze as an issue, since the shots with the were taken within a few minutes of one another.

Which of the lenses is worse for transferring vibration to the image, I'm not at all sure. I would expect vibration to be more of an issue with the longer lens, all other things being equal, but they aren't - the 400mm telephoto is heavier and physically longer than the 600mm mirror.

All I can say is that I used the remote to fire the shots, using the mirror-up delay, and there was a marked difference between the lenses.

I'll try and knock up something crude to compare the sharpness of the lenses later.

I was taking pictures of the full moon last night, with my newly acquired Sigma 600mm F8 mirror lens and the K10D.

I was hoping to improve on the results I've obtained with my Sigma 400mm F5.6 telephoto, such as

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/IMGP2385-1b.jpg

and

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/MoonPretotality.jpg

, but the results were very disappointing.

Despite careful focusing, tripod (duh!), mirror-up delay, fired with the remote, and short exposures (shorter than 1/125), I just couldn't get sharp images.

I put the 400mm back on the front, and within a minute or two had sharpness comparable to the earlier attempts, and much better than with the mirror lens, even after enlargement to the same size.

So I'm assuming, in the absence of further evidence, that it's simply the lens quality.

So, questions:

Is this to be expected?

If so, what's the point of the mirror lens? Other than the fact that it's physically a lot shorter than the 400mm telephoto.

It's supposed to, but there are metering issues with this approach.

Have a look at these threads:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4222
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3867

How strange.

Given that if you type 'Stan Halpin' into Google, it's the first site that comes up, I'm assuming that you typed 'Stan Halpins' in instead.

In which case I hereby award you and Mongoose (jointly) the "Muppet award for failure to know how to use the humble apostrophe", which I just invented.

Mongoose for missing it out, and you for not noticing that it should have been there.

Have you ever used Google, Pete?