Nikon Coolpix 950 with Telescope Day Test

The tiny little small tower on the right is the Empire State Building. The Clock Tower in the middle is the Con Edison Building on 14th Street and 3rd Avenue.

Because of the bright sky, I had to keep the Exposure compensation setting to 0.7.

Since I was using a 54mm eyepiece on a 820mm telescope, it gives only about 15x power. Plus the camera's own 3x, it's about 45x. No need to use any mounting yet. However, because of the warm air turbulence generated from other roof tops and the streets down below, I did use BSS (Best-Shot Selection) to get the sharest picture.

I had the camera shooting directly at the eyepiece on the telescope. Notice a little dark halo at the left and right corner of the picture? That's from the edge of the eyepiece from the telescope.

If you click on the picture, you get the XGA (1024x768) size picture (353KB). See all of those tourists looking down?

I was using a 25mm with a 2x barlow. The telescope gives about 65x. I guess the camera was in it's 2x mode (16.4mm). It essentially in a 130x mode. The FOV (Field of View) was a little dark. With such strong air turbulence and low light, the suggested shutter speed was about 1/30. Since I tried the Sensitive setting before and it yielded fantanstic result, I cranked it up all the way to +2.0. Now I have a more workable 1/250 shutter speed.

The "seeing" was not good at all. The faces are little fuzzy due to the turbulence. If I can take some pictures in continues mode with a 1/1000 shutter speed, I'm sure you can see what I saw through the telescope directly. At times, you get a crystal clear view and you can actually tell who they are (if you know who they are).