Learning to Use My Mavica
Day One
Yesterday, I bought a Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 digital camera.
Today, I took a bunch of boring real estate pictures.
This evening, I held it up to the eyepiece of my Pronto and got this:
(Well, OK, I hacked on it for a few minutes with Photoshop, but I figure that's fair for digital images :-)
Day Two
Much lower cost/benefit ratio today. I spent several hours playing around with various combinations of tripod setups using one tripod for the Pronto and another to hold the Mavica above the eyepiece. The following two images (selected from about a dozen) are a little better than yesterday's 5 minute effort, but not much :-(
What I've learned so far:
- using a tripod helps, as does the self timer
- the only way to control exposure is to make the Moon fill the field or nearly so
- frame mode seems to be only very slightly better than field mode, more experiments needed
- eyepiece projection is tricky, best results so far with my otherwise least favorite eyepiece, the 40mm TV Plossl. I wasn't able to make it work at all with the 7mm Nagler; it worked a little, but poorly, with the 19mm Panoptic.
- the Moon moves so fast that it's a real pain to keep the "system" aligned. Clearly a driven scope and an adapter to hold the Mavica to the eyepiece is what's really needed. But such an adapter might be tricky to construct. Too bad the lens doesn't come off.
Maybe more light will help so the next thing is to try with the LX200.
OTOH, it is amazing that this works at all. You can't really expect this to stand up to an ST-7!
Day Three
Today I tried the Sun. I found it very difficult to keep the camera aligned. Not sure what's going on. Yesterday's Moon images were much easier. Perhaps the Sun's much brightness is making it all the more difficult for the auto-exposure "algorithm". The following image shows a nice sunspot (I say "nice" because of what I saw in the eyepiece, not this image :-(
And this one was taken with a glass solar filter simply held in front of the Mavica's lens:
Nice effect, but not very accurate :-)
I tried the Moon this evening with my LX200. As expected higher magnification was possible. But as I was hand-holding and in Field mode, the results are still not what I would expect is possible:
Further experimentation will have to be suspended for a while until we return from the eclipse in Aruba. Meanwhile, it remember this is really a snapshot camera. Here is a better example of what it is intended for:
(to be fair, Photoshop gets a lot of the credit on this one; click it for the original.)
Day Three
Today just a couple of quick snapshots of my friends Dave and Akkana:
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Bill Arnett; last updated:
1998 Mar 1
