Astrophotography through a Nightvision Scope

Just for fun, I took some star pictures through my Generation 1 nightvision scope. It was a very clear night in the mountains of North Carolina, and I set my camera up on a tripod and hand-held my 3x nightvision monocular up to the lens of the camera. I put the camera on infinity focus, and used the autoexposure mode. The hardest part was getting the eyepiece focus on the scope right--I took a lot of exposures to get a few in focus. I tried using autofocus on the camera, but generally the star images were too faint for the camera to focus on. All of the exposures ended up being 1" at f/2.8. The images were taken at about 00:30 EST on December 28, 2003.

	Orion's sword with the Orion nebula (middle), below Orion's belt (three bright stars at top with bad coma from the nightvision scope optics).
	The Hyades open star cluster in Taurus.
	The Pleaides open star cluster in Taurus.