bigger bird feeder

When we bought our new telescope at the weekend, we got a few peripherals, including a gadget to attach a smartphone camera to the eyepiece.  The gadget also fits binoculars, and I’ve been playing around with it today.

This is the view of our birdfeeder with the phone camera, and, from the same spot, with the camera attached to a pair of 8x42 binoculars:

small, far away

through binoculars

So, once there are actually some birds around, I should get some much better pictures.

The picture through the binoculars is cropped, because it gets a circular image.  Amusingly, from a distance, if you squint, the full picture looks a bit like Jupiter on its side:

not Jupiter!

Later in the evening, I tried the gadget on some 15x70 binoculars, looking at Venus, which is very bright in the west at the moment:

Venus, smeared; 17:33 GMT

Hmm.  Even firmly bolted to binoculars firmly bolted to a tripod, the camera wobbles when I touch the shutter button.  So I’ve now ordered a bluetooth remote shutter control…

Once the telescope is all properly aligned and calibrated, I'll try it on that, too.