Hi,

I'm thinking of getting a Skywatcher Explorer 130PM around christmas as my first ever scope and since it has tracking I will probably try my hand at astro photography aswell. I have been looking at the "fuji finepix s3500 slr" which seems pretty good except no manual shutter setting. Still i've seen good astro pictures taken with this and it's cheap most of all...

Anyway would anyone like to comment on this beginner setup? perhaps someone has had experience with the s3500 with this or another telescope. Would the fact that the camera is an slr make it easy to use on the scope directly to the eyepiece with an adapater as opposed to just putting the lens against the eyepiece? Any information would be appreciated plus possible alternatives.

Thanks,
Mike

Urm are you sure you dont mean the fuji finepix s3500? i cant find a fujutsu s3500 on the net, but i know that Fuji make the FinePix s3500 which isnt actually an SLR/DSLR, it has a fixed lens with a 6x zoom. I would imagine it would be ok for lunar and brighter planetary work, probably best used with eyepiece projection, but the fact that it doesnt have full manual control means it might be tricky to get good images. the 6x zoom would be ok for wide field imaging.


I own a Fuji FinePix s 9600 which is the top of Fuji's non DSLR (prosumer) line which has many of the features of a DSLR except it has a fixed lens with 10x optical zoom (manual control by rotating ring on lens) and a display behind the viewfinder instead of an optical view system. with full manual control it performs ok for astro imaging, the 10x zoom is just enough to produce a reasonable image of the moon, it would help if the zoom was longerbut you can buy screw on telephoto extenders in either 2x or 3x giving 20x or 30x respectively.

At the moment i'm limited to around a 5 sec exposure as i dont have a driven/guided mount... theres a few pics on my web page (link in my sig) most of them arent very good, mainly due to the lack of guiding but it will give you an idea of what you can achieve with a similar camera.

In hindsight i wish i had bought one of the DSLR range mainly because DSLR can be atached to the telescope for prime focus imaging (camera lens removed, and adaptor to fit telescope) Also for the fact that the DSLRs have the ability to be controled via a pc, which would make astroimaging a lot less hassle, i've got to stand there with a flexi shutter release, press it to start the frame, then wait till the exposure is done, then wait for the camera to save the RAW file to the memory card. getting 40 frames of 5 seconds takes in the region of 30 mins

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My Collection:
Dollond Naturlux 10x50 5deg bins
Sky Watcher Explorer 6" f/8 Newtonian with Moonlite Stepper driven Crayford on HEQ5 Pro SynScan mount.
Telrad Finder.
Selection of SLR lenses: 400mm f/6.3, 300mm f/5.5, 200mm f/3.5 & 135mm f/2.8
Canon 10d, EF 24/85mm f3.5/4.5 USM & Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8
Philips SPC900NC
SC3 monochrome webcam
Atik 16IC-S & Atik motorised filter wheel with Astronomik LRGB filters

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