Very useful back in the early days of wet plate photography but modern film will wait till you get home...

Thinking about it 1.5 stops either side would cover the variation which is more reasonable. Personal taste will often cover a larger spread in exposure.

I apologise for doubting you, your links look highly plausible. I was just going by comments I've read in several of my Astrophotography books & astrophotography websites...

The rule of thumb I quoted does work reasonably well, so the effect is fairly small. One of your links suggests ~2.5 stops maximum, I be surprised if it works out as much as that.

Sorry you're wrong here.
The bright part of the moon is in full sunlight at every phase so is always at the same brightness. Unless you are trying to capture the unlit side or taking during an eclipse the exposure required remains the same.

Exposure is best done with spot metering or fully manual, otherwise the amount of dark sky will confuse the camera (This normally wants to be black). IIRC the guideline exposure is 1/ISO seconds at f8.

Surely the motion blur is dependant on the focal length - I know with my telescope it can take only ~10s for the viewed portion to completely change.

I've only got one camera/lens combination thats weather sealed. If it's wet That'll normally be the one I use. Even if I really want 10x the focal length.

Not vitally important to me as most of my cameras/lenses aren't sealed, but it's certainly good to have the option to ignore the weather. I'd certainly rather a few more of mine were WR, but I have to limit costs and cant afford to upgrade perfectly good gear just for WR.

No real experience but if you use a 18% grey card for your exposure readings then subject colour/tone shouldn't effect the results.

A couple of the shots in my PU portfolio are using the cheap fisheye converters which can be had for ~£25.




Not up to the quality of a proper Fisheye but possibly enough for your purposes.

I had a very quick look at the link, and I'm convinced the tripod wouldn't be up to any astronomical use.
In addition the description list loads of magnification powers without referencing the objective size - a sure sign of a low quality scope!

Light gathering power is all to do with the objective size, it's easy to fit a different eyepiece to get more magnification, but if there's not enough light you won't get an improved image. Often half the magnification claimed for cheap scopes is just empty magnification that gives no further detail.

It's possible to pick up reasonable telescopes used via e-bay for ~£100 with a bit of patience, at least if you know what to look for. My scope a Celestron 130 with motor driven EQ3 mount was about that and qualifies as a good beginner's scope.

If your budget's less than that I'd certainly second Steep's suggestion of binoculars. Which in many ways are a better buy anyway. The scope needs careful alignment to set it up, and is very heavy too. In 3+ years I've only set it up properly twice. Once at a local star party, and once for photography only to find the cold effected my batteries and they died before I'd got the camera set-up right. (It seems SLRs have difficulty getting close enough for prime focus with most Newtonian scopes)

More recently I have used my scope on a heavy duty video/studio tripod (which cost used as much again as the astro gear) for terrestrial imaging. Which has enabled me to get the camera mounting sorted, and given some reasonable pictures of distant items. - The lifeboat at the far end of the local pier, I don't want any one to think I'm pointing it at their house...
Best results were either Prime focus with a compact system camera, or with low power eyepieces and a basic point & shoot just held at the eyepiece. These work out around 15x-20x magnification, the highest magnification I tried works out about 400x but at f/128 it was severely limited by diffraction and didn't actualy show any more detail.

The scope works reasonably well for photography BUT it's bulk and the hassle of setting up etc make it unlikely to get used much. Binoculars on the other hand can just be grabbed and give you visual observing in seconds. Used from a deckchair they can make for quite comfortable viewing too.

Shame looks like a nice spot, ideal spot for a PU meet-up!

I've added my work as I don't leave valuables there

Surely that a large format camera! Not up to Pentax's normal build quality IMO.