Monday April 02, 2007

While viewing birds with a telescope this weekend I decided to try some afocal imaging-- shooting photographs through a telescope (or binocular, or microscope) objective. This is also called digiscoping. I hand held the camera (with its focus set at infinity) so the results are not great, but you can see the promise of the technique. The birds were about 150 yards away and the magnification was about 75X. The first shot shows several great blue herons in a rookery in Westwood, MA. The second is a shot of a different tree in the same rookery. The two small birds are kingfishers. If you look closely in the bottom nest, you can see a great horned owl looking over its shoulder at the rightmost kingfisher.