Wesley's Tool-Box

Instead of stars or planets, the sky today is treating me with lightning strikes at the rate of one every 20 seconds or so. So much lightning, that I was able to catch them twice in a couple of minutes. Good thing I wasn't planning to go to a theme park or something.

In testing the long exposure capabilities of my Canon SX50 HS, I was able to capture the constellation Lyra in its near entirety by accident. Due to cloudy weather and bad light pollution, only the brightest star, Vega was visible to the naked eye. I intended to take a picture of this, but the 1-second exposure revealed the other stars in the constellation as well. I've labeled them in the photo. You can also take a look at the full resolution photo HERE.

Settings: 165mm(6.875x) - ISO 1600 - 1s
Time: 2013-08-07 00:17:01

That's the question I had in the attempts to extend an already powerful 50x optical zoom on my Canon SX50 HS. The results aren't very impressive.

I bought two teleconverters for testing. The cheap one is a Vivitar Titanium 2.0X, at about US$40. The expensive one is a Raynox DCR-1540PRO with 1.54x zoom, at about $200. Unfortunately, the latter had been discontinued a long time ago (it came out at least in 2003), so I had to buy a dusty used one at half the price.

The collection of crops above really tells it all. The cheap Vivitar is trash. Completely unusable, chromatic aberrations and all. It works okay at low zoom, but that defeats the purpose.

Meanwhile, the expensive Raynox has been advertised as "for 25x or higher zoom" and "340lp/mm at center", so I was expecting better. Well, the colours are fine but it doesn't come into focus as well as I would want it to. Even at the best spot (seems to be at lower center region, not outright center for SX50 HS) it doesn't really add more detail. This might be usable for video mode, but not much value for still photos.

As for the actual multiplication, close (~5m) shots got about 1.3x for Raynox and 1.4x for Vivitar, getting roughly about half the spec. Far (~250m) shots are better, at about 1.52x for Raynox and 1.8x for Vivitar.

If anyone's searching around to see if one needs a teleconverter for a SX50 HS, I can easily tell you "don't bother".

I've gotten around to fitting Baader AstroSolar safety film onto my Canon SX50 HS. The first round of tests, taking photos of Sun with my daughter, worked pretty well. I forgot to zoom all the way in, but the sunspots are readily visible.

Settings: 864mm (36x) - ISO 80 - 1/100s - 9 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

There's been a lot of fuss (again) about the "Supermoon" that was supposed to come up during the night because the Moon was at the closest distance from the Earth for this year. Well, this is it. It was rather cloudy all day, so I was worried I might not get any good shots. Thankfully, the clouds thinned out from time to time and allowed me to grab enough photos. Remember to click on the photo to see the full-resolution version.

Canon SX50 HS - 2013-06-23 23:11 KST - 1200mm - ISO 80 - 1/60s - 12 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8