Moonrise & Aurora

Moonrise & Aurora

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I am looking to buy a telescope for about $250, are there any at that price range that can be mounted on a Canon body?

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Just an important note: While @PaulRound's answer is completely correct, just being able to mount a camera on a telescope is often not enough. Photographing the night sky, especially with telescopes that have small apertures (like a cheap one for $250 is very likely to), you have to expose for quite a while to get a good shot. Alternatively, you can take many consecutive shots of the same object, and stack them in post to improve saturation. Without a tracking mount (which tend to be very expensive) doing astrophotography will likely be rather difficult. – jrista♦ Oct 6 '11 at 1:00
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@jrista: this is a very good point. Astronomical photography does tend to need long exposure times so a tracking mount is pretty much essential if your going to do this seriously. Totally out of the price range of this question though the mount is likely to cost more than $250 to get accurate enough tracking for long exposure imaging. – Paul Round Oct 6 '11 at 8:31

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You don't tend to get telescopes designed for a particular camera, what you need to look for is a telescope camera mount for your 60D. This is a device which replaces the eye piece on the telescope with an EF mount which the camera is connected to instead of a normal lens. The adapter usually consists of two parts. A 'T' adapter which fits directly onto the telescope and a 'T' ring which provides the correct coupling to any given camera. Using an adapter such as this you will be able to connect your camera to pretty much any telescope. http://www.telescopehouse.com have a good range in their online catalog in the Astro Imaging section and, although its a UK site, it will at least give you a good idea what to look for. There are lots of low end telescopes in your price range that a camera adapter can be fitted to which will give you pretty good results.

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Short answer.....NO. Not at that price point. A better option is this astrophotography bundle from Orion:

http://www.telescope.com/Astrophotography/Astrophotography-Solutions/Orion-Adventures-in-Astrophotography-Bundle/pc/-1/c/4/sc/59/p/27154.uts

It includes an equatorial mount and tripod, and a motor drive, for around $160.

Attach your camera and get started with astrophotography. You could even use a telephoto lens, maybe up to 200mm. For an even cheaper but quite effective alternative, google 'barn door mount'.

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I done a fair bit of astrophotography, both wide field and through various telescopes. If that linked item works, wow, what a deal! I almost want to sell my stuff and buy that... :- ) Thanks for the link. – Paul Cezanne Jan 5 at 17:39

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