Mongo-Lens - The Camera on Steroids!

Mongo-Lens - The Camera on Steroids!

Lynn bought the family a telescope for Christmas as the family present in 1998 (a Celestron FirstScope F80 EQ WA). We've been having great fun with it all year, but after Christmas 1999 I bought some accessories for it! One accessory was a 2x Barlow lens that doubles magnification of any eyepiece. Another accessory was a 6mm high-power eyepiece, which when used in conjunction with the new Barlow lens makes a very powerful telescope - Jupiter's stripes and 4 moons are clearly visible, and Saturn's rings can be individually discerned in sharp detail! In a word - awesome!

The most interesting accessory is a T-adapter to couple my Pentax SpotMatic SLR camera to the telescope, effectively making it a Mongo Telephoto Camera Lens!

The pictures below are scans of the results of the first roll of film run through the camera-telescope combination as a test. I was blown away....... These pictures were taken January 8, 2000, approximately 10AM, at Horn Pond in Woburn....... Click on the thumbnails to see the full-size photos (sizes are listed).....

Reference Photo (58kb JPEG file) - taken from the causeway bridge, looking across the lagoon. Black square on the image is the effective field of view of the second photo below.....

The Mongo-Lens in action! (103kb JPEG file) Taken with the same camera as the reference photo above, attached to the F80 EQ WA telescope, and also using a Vivitar 2x extender (a little insert that doubles any camera lens attached to is, so the telescope was doubled).....

Side-by-side comparison (2 images, 161kb total)

How about the two, side-by-side? (161kb worth of combined images, but if you've already looked a the ones above then you should have them in your browser cache so you should not have to download them a 2nd time)

Seagulls in the Mongo-Lens! (45kb JPEG file)

More Mongo-Lens! (45kb JPEG file) The gaggle of seagulls huddling together on the ice in the reference photo look like this through the telescope-lens.....

Telescope and Camera Rig (35kb JPEG file)

The rig (35kb JPEG file)..... This is the Celestron (L.L. Bean marketed) F80 EQ WA telescope, with my old Pentax SpotMatic SLR and Vivitar 2x extender mounted.....