Still more astronomy blogging...

As some of you may have gleaned from some previous posts, I'm a bit of an amateur astronomer. Generally I work in the radio part of the spectrum, but recently have moved into shorter wavelength visual work. To that end I purchased a 12.7cm (5 inch) telescope last summer. I've done some prime focus work and some eyepiece projection work, but also wanted to do some piggyback work, as even a relatively small telescope such as mine doesn't see a lot of the sky at once. This can be rectified by piggybacking a camera on the telescope and using the camera lenses, which have a much greater field of view.

The problem being that no one that I could find makes a piggyback adapter for my telescope. Now my telescope has a dovetail mount for it's finderscope so I though someone, somewhere must make an adapter that fits this type of dovetail. Nope, no luck. I did find that Televue made a dovetail adapter for one of it's parts (not a piggyback mount). The adapter fit my dovetail and had two threaded holes to mount whatever part you wanted. After some though and a chat with the good folks over at Alberta Premium Optics (as part of my search for an adapter) a simple design came into being. By mounting a short piece of aluminum stock on the dovetail adapter and putting an appropriate size hole in one end of the aluminum stock, viola, instant piggyback adapter for under $25!

Here's the adapter by itself:

Here's the adapter hooked up to my old film camera. I normally use my digital camera for astro-photo work, but I needed the digital camera to take the pictures.

Here's the whole assembly attached to my telescope.

The adapter works quite well. By twisting the camera a bit, it's easy to line it up so that it's pointing at the same object the main telescope is pointing at. Also, the dovetail makes it easy to swap the camera and finderscope while observing. This allows me to use the finderscope to point the main telescope, then swap out the finder for the camera and then take a piggyback photo. Sweet!

Here's a photo of M45 (Pleiades) taken piggybacked on my MAK127 with my Nikon D50 using a 500mm mirror lens. Click on picture for a larger image.