I finally attached my Canon 1DsMk2 to my Meade LX200GPS 10" Schmitt-Cassegrain telescope and got some great close lunar shots

This was just a rough go at it and pretty much just a test of the onboard tracking system in my telescope mount

Believe it or not, it's not easy to watch the moon at this magnification because it moves so fast, so the telescope has a tracking system that allows it to move super gently and keep whatever I program into it to stay in the frame

Now that I got this set up, I'm planning on adding quite a few more to this gallery

Sorry about the general darkness of this one but as I mentioned, this was my first go with the actual telescope ... I prefer just using a long lens, my DSLR and a nice steady tripod, but I had reached the limits of resolution as you can see in my other moon shots so I had to do something else

Next up will be planetary photography, some deep space stuff if I can find come nice colorful nebulae or something like that ...hopefully some satellite and space station photography and of course my favorite, more lunar photography

Hope you like it ... as with all of my work, this is free for you to use in your dA work as you want to, but please put a link to your work in here so I can see what you've made of it … any work outside of dA is also OK but I would like a link to that as well so I can check it out

There are NO restrictions on using this in your print work either ... if you can manipulate this and sell it as a print, good for you ... as far as I go, I do this just for the fun of it and making money from my photography would somehow belittle it and make it less 'special' for me

I DID include this in my print account, just like all of my other work, but I only do this so people have a good and high quality option available if they want one of my photos printed ... DeviantArt prints are very high quality (especially the canvas prints ... amazing!) - whatever "profit" I make from any prints that I sell will either go directly towards my dA subscription, or I will be happy to donate my take of the prints to YOUR dA subscription if you want (the profit from my prints is really small, usually less than $2.00 even on the large ones, so you’re paying for the actual print, not for me taking the photo)

I have my prints set at the very lowest cost that the system will allow me to, so if you do want any of my photos printed, it's not that bad of a deal

This one is the full sized un-cropped 4492x3328 image ... I sharpened it a little in Photoshop CS3 and slightly adjusted the contrast and brightness, but otherwise this is how it came out

Have fun with it, I sure am ... more to come soon … hit the DOWNLOAD button for the really big version with NO WATERMARK!