Hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro.
I guess we've all tried to take a quick
picture through our telescope maybe of the moon or one of the one of the
planets using our smartphone and you hold the camera up to the eyepiece and
you take potluck sometimes you can get a good picture, certainly I've taken a few
okay pictures of the moon but more often than not it's quite frustrating to try
and position the camera over the eyepiece so today we're going to have a
look at the adapter to solve our problem and this is one called a
"Go Sky universal digitscoping smartphone adapter" and basically its consists of a
clamp to attach to the eyepiece and then a tray that you put your phone in and
then some adjustments so that you can line everything up it's one of the
cheaper options out on the market I picked this up for less than 15 pounds
so let's give it a go
okay so we attach the adapter around the outside of the eyepiece like this so you
can see it's got a clamp on all four sides and you adjust this screw so that
the adapter will fit a range of eyepiece sizes,
so I've used a few 1 1/4" eyepieces and had no problem attaching it firmly to each of those although
perhaps some of the ones which have got a rubber I cap you've got to be a little
bit careful that you can still get a firm attachment and you see here here's
the tray adjust the width the tray and I can slide the tray along in this
direction to see if I can get the right position for the camera so okay let's
try and do a live demonstration so when I put the camera onto the tray and slide
it in and then what we're going to do is adjust a couple of adjustment screws
that we've got so I'm looking at the screw underneath which is making a
movement you can see like that and sideways along the tray and by doing
that we can get a pretty good field illumination and certainly if i zoom in
then we've got a good video illumination here and hopefully if if we're lucky we
might see a little bit of squirrel activity coming towards the feeder here
there we go so digiscoping getting a pretty decent
view and I can zoom in and zoom out and it's a nice and stable attachment so let's
say so far so good daytime object nice and easy to achieve
a good stable picture
OK so just after sunset this is the first Astro target for the digiscoping
adapter so you can see planet Venus I've used the "Night Cap Pro" app to adjust the
exposure because the normal camera was a little bit overexposed so it allows us
to see taken through the William Optics GT81 a pretty good view of the
approximately 50% illuminated disc of the planet Venus
so this is Messier 45 the famous Pleiades or Seven Sisters open cluster
in the constellation of Taurus again I'm using the Night Cap Pro app on this
iPhone and I've boosted the exposure and the ISO speed rating in order to get the best live image on the video
and finally probably the most commonly imaged target
for digiscoping, again using the night cap Pro app to
reduce the exposure but you can see it's pretty straightforward to get a good
image nice stable mounting of the camera over the eyepiece and we can get a good
picture of the moon so is the go-sky Universal digiscoping smartphone adapter any good?
Well I'd say definitely it is yes
for the money you can't go too far wrong we've seen you can take good daytime and
nighttime photos with a bit of practice it's well put together it's mainly metal
or some plastic parts but the main construction of the clamp is metal and
the adjustments are quite effective one observation I suppose is that
sometimes when you're trying to place the camera at the right position
relative to the the eyepiece you've got the camera in the in the cradle here
basically the design allows you to adjust the position in two dimensions
sometimes that means that you don't get a full illumination of the of the camera
and really what you end up doing is you end up trying to tilt can slightly
further away from the eyepiece to get more of an illumination, now this is fine except
of course you've got to be careful that you don't cause the phone to slip out of
the cradle so perhaps you can see that it may be more sophisticated adapter
costing more money allows you to precisely adjust the
separation in that third dimension and it's a small point that something you
definitely gotta be aware of. What else? well it's a nicely packaged product for
money it comes with a good set of instructions and even comes with some
tips and hints if you have problems so well-constructed
versatile for a range of smartphone sizes I think they have two models
there's a large model and this model but they both have the same size of cradle I
believe for for the smartphone the difference being whether they'll accept
a larger diameter eyepiece or not this is the standard model and as I mentioned
for its accept twenty eight to forty seven millimeter diameter eyepieces
certainly no problem with standard 1 1/4" eyepieces like this so
overall I'd say for the money as long as you're careful to make sure your
camera is secure in the adapter then it's a good product
okay thanks for watching
you