Telescope best for using with Fuji XT2?

[Lulu b]

I want to buy my husband a telescope to use alongside his Fuji XT2 camera - does anyone have any recommendations as I have no idea about them! My budget is about £200

Thanks everyone in advance

 

[aramgrg]

Astrophotography is an expensive hobby. I am afraid you can't get anything useful for 200. At that price point, the best investment would be to buy a cheap star tracker, like ioptron skytracker, or star adventurer. Then again, those are not telescopes, they are mounts that can help to take longer exposures using the existing equipment. If you want a telescope setup, consider at least 5 times that budget.

 

[Vincent DP]

Hello,

With your budget, you could buy a telescope used to take photos of the Moon, and maybe Saturn and Jupiter. That's about it.

If he wants to photograph the Milky Way, you could buy him a sky tracker, like the Star Adventurer Mini.

For deep space (nebulae, galaxies, etc.) the cost would be much higher.

 

[JimH123]

I want to buy my husband a telescope to use alongside his Fuji XT2 camera - does anyone have any recommendations as I have no idea about them! My budget is about £200

Thanks everyone in advance

Please be aware that most of the less expensive telescopes are not designed to be used with a camera and have a problem getting the camera close enough to obtain infinity focus.

And once you have a telescope and camera that work together, you need a good enough mount to track an object long enough to get an image. For example, just using a 300mm lens on a camera such as your husband has, a 1 sec exposure is enough to see tiny star trails.

The best route for a beginner to go is to use a cheap tracker such as iOptron, and to just use the camera with a lens. But that opens another problem. Many lenses are not good at astrophotography and show various distortions that just don't show up with normal photography. Stars are a very difficult subject. They are point sources of light, and bring out all the weaknesses of the lens. The Fuji XT2 happens to be a very decent camera for shooting in low light, but what lens is used is critical.

As for low cost telescopes that can be used with cameras, one manufacturer I can think of is Astro-Tech. Here are some samples:

Loading…

www.scopecity.com

 

[Astrophotographer 10]

I want to buy my husband a telescope to use alongside his Fuji XT2 camera - does anyone have any recommendations as I have no idea about them! My budget is about £200

Thanks everyone in advance

This one is popular:

Loading…

www.astronomics.com

A telescope is of no use though unless you have a mount. So money is spent on the mount as with telescopes you are attempting to image a moving target with longish exposures with a zoomed in view.

So as others mentioned the usual step is to use a camera lens like the Samyang 12mm F2 for Fuji X and use a tripod and say 15-20 second exposures at ISO1600-3200 will work nicely. Take several and stack them using free Sequator software.

Next step would be a mini tracker for the camera like those linked or Vixen Polarie.

Now you can take longer focal length lens images with up to several minutes exposure time (your XT2 has a built in intervalometer so you can expose up to 15 minutes).

XT2 is a good night sky camera as it is very low noise and quite a sensitive sensor.

An Orion ED80 is another old time popular first telescope that doubles as an excellent telephoto lens. Just get a Tadapter for Fuji to mount it to the scope.

Greg.