My first astrophoto.. got some questions

I decided to purchase a new digital camera last night, an Olympus C-5050Z. I decided to test it out with my Konus reflector which I just set up outside, and did not give sufficient time to cool down. I am curious what is the proper procedure for taking pictures in this method? In my case, I just held it up to an eyepiecec which gave me the full FOV through the LCD in the camera. I took a few shots of the moon and this is what I got:

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In addition to the good advise from the others (dial down your camera's exposure, getting a camera adapter from, say, scopetronix, and filtering) you might also investigate post processing using any of several image processing programs. Even rudimentary free photo adjustment programs of the type that sometimes come bundled with computers or other hardware can be of use.

I use Paint Shop Pro v.8, which retails for a fraction of the cost of Adobe Photoshop, while delivering a lot of the same features, including color channel separation and "curves".

I'm attaching a shot of mine from last night using the following:

80mm Orion Ultrascan achromat
on fixed camera tripod mount.
12mm Radian eyepiece projection
Leica 2.1 megapixel digital camera
attached to scope w/a home made adapter.
http://www.nwlink.com/~filmdos/m111/equipment.htm#Cameras
single exposure using the camera's timer.

Best of luck to you - you're obviously of to a great start.

Don't forget to have fun!

-Paul S. Walsh
http://www.nwlink.com/~filmdos/m111

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