Rick Womer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asked:
> Neat! Where were you, and how far away was the chopper?
Short answer: I was at home and the helicopter was a mile away.
The chopper was over downtown Baltimore, MD, US, preparing to
land atop the University of Maryland Medical Center. I was
about a mile to the west of that (1.1 miles according to my
car's odometer; I haven't double-checked that with Google Maps
yet), using the telescope I borrowed from my brother (which
he describes as "a cheap, Wal-Mart scope" -- f=700mm, d=60mm,
poor correction (if any) for chromatic aberration and spherical
aberration (I got colour fringing when I tried to shoot Jupiter
and didn't have it centered), a similarly cheap "Barlow lens"
(2x teleconverter, more or less, as far as I can tell), and
using a cymbal stand with a boom instead of a tripod, because
the tripod that came with the scope doesn't work so well for
leaning out a window and looking sideways.
Just to complete the picture of the kludginess involved: the
telescope/microscop->Kmount adaptor I'm using (given to me
by a bandmate a few years ago) is sized for a _real_ telescope
... and this scope uses eyepieces that various amateur astronomy
websites describe as "occasionally found on cheaper, department
store telescopes", so instead of fitting into the receiver
tube it slides _over_ the tube and I'm holding it on with
gaffer's tape. (I'll eventually either get a cheap eyepiece
adaptor that'll fit the camera adaptor, or drill and tap holes
for set-screws in the camera adaptor.)
So, near as I can figure, that was 1400mm and f/22, on a wobbly
support.
My brother also gave me the wooden stock from a busted rifle;
I'm going to try to turn it into a grip for the scope+camera
combination to make it a little easier to use handheld than it
currently is. I plan to put two shutter switches on it: one
roughly where the rifle's trigger had been, and one up under
the telescope, so I can use whichever hand isn't fussing with
the focus knob to trip the shutter. I'm hoping that having
a big, fat, white thing on top instead of a slender, dark rifle
barrel will keep the police from mistaking the rig for a weapon
once it's completed.
In the meantime, I should get up on the roof at some point and
use the proper telescope tripod. But I haven't gotten around
to that yet.
-- Glenn
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