Looks great! love the metalic look on the bridge
Tonal variations in stitching show up most at small sizes, so it looks fine in that respect.
Grass looks a little HDRy, maybe kill off the saturation a little over there?

Cool, thanks Sharon, and thanks for the comments re the photos

The Kenko eyepiece arrived overnight this morning - excellent service and price from Uttings. Nice piece of kit, seems well made and first impressions with the 300mm are that it's the equal of any binoculars I can remember
I think that will become my new lens cap for this lens

Ha! So it's an illusion. That's good to know, as I get frustrated with the optical quality when it's low.
I suspect the same illusion occurs when we put a familiar object into the scene. Which would explain why we find sush compositions so beguiling.

When it's low it's big if course, but also it's less sharp and the atmosphere adds its own colour which prevents the moon's true colours from showing through. So if you wait till it's high you can crank up the saturation without it just going yellow. Try it
Shooting the moon is great practice for lots of disciplines especially sharpening!

And earlier this evening.


Would be so much nicer if I didn't have to work the file so hard!
This (click on it) is as big as 300mm will go on a K5 without any help
Bought an eyepiece for my my lenses, so at least they aren't door stops for 95 percent of their lives

I did try to order one earlier, but despite the ad saying 49 it came out out 79 sniff.
You have to do some research before buying, by which time it had been 'fixed'.

Oh great! thanks a bunch for flagging this up! I was going to buy one of these 30 quid cheaper and now it's just gone up. Brilliant. Way to go people, moan about something being too cheap...

I have a Centon 500 f8 mirror lens which I understand is not as good as the Tamron, but it would be fun to put an eyepiece onto that and mount it properly. it's not a patch on the DA* 300 for moon shots tho, even if I re-sample the 300 shot up to the size of the 500.
Don't s'pose you want to sell your Tamron Johnha?

The main reason for this thread is to quickly get a photographer's perspective on telescopes, mainly for moon shots and general viewing with the children. I kinda guessed it would get complicated; if it was easy, everyone would be at it

Incidentally here's the sort of thing I'm getting at 300mm. but I'd love to get something big enough to print.

Hastily-grabbed outside the front door, hand-held, 100th F5.6, ISO100 7am.


Tripod-mounted.


Next day, higher in the sky, so smaller, but it accepted a bit of license with the saturation (less haze)

I'll check out the Stargazers, thanks. I suspect I'll be another year figuring out which one to get once I start there tho
Thanks for you help guys, Very useful

Thanks guys.
So if I get the SW150 optics, umm... Can I mount it on anything, or does it have to be on a specific mount?
I'm certain I'm going to want to photograph the results and i just know I'm not going to be happy with some noisy little sensor