3 photos of cruising airliners

[JEL]

Testing my ability to capture and track airliners in flight for digi-scoping purposes...
That is tricky!

Here's 3 of the best photos I managed to get from my attempts:

http://jelair.jelstudio.dk/observatory/aircraft/index.html

A 747 at 38,000', a 737 at 37,000' and an A321 at 38,000'

 

[Turbinator]

I would love to know the details of how you do this.

I tried using my telescope to watch the planes landing at my airport, and I can only keep them in view for about 1.5 seconds at a time before I completely loose them. And then it takes another 3 minutes to get them in view again. Very frustrating.

 

[HAL9001]

I can think that a flightplan is useful (as long as planes don't go late) and google earth could help you finding out in wich direction to look (excactly)...
and when you already have your camera at the telescope and only look through the display, than 1 second is enough to take a good photo...

But I don't know how exactly to do this, because I never did it

 

[JEL]

I point and shoot... basically

As you can see on the photos there are contrails, which actually help locate the aircraft a lot
I'm not sure I could actually find any aircraft without the contrails.

I look through the camera's view-finder, while moving the camera in the general direction of where the aircraft is, then I scan up and down until I hit the contrail, and then track in on the aircraft from there while trying to focus it as sharp as possible, having less than 1 minute for the whole thing.

It's really not possible to hold the aircraft in the center of the image, let alone holding it still, so I shoot at a high frame-rate (it's called burst mode on my camera, but you can also just use video. I used both modes to see which one gave the best results and both worked fine) while trying to keep it in view, and then simply selected the 3 best and least-blurry images from the big bunch of photos I got. Most of the photos just show a motion-blurred blob

 

[Turbinator]

I was trying to point my telescope at planes that are on final, visible from my bedroom. So I am dealing with very close distances and high relateiveistic speeds. For the split second that I do get the plane in vew, I can allmost see inside the windows. I dont have a DSLR so I cant take pics with my telescope. The burst feature would be -very- usefull.

 

[Linguofreak]

I was trying to point my telescope at planes that are on final, visible from my bedroom. So I am dealing with very close distances and high relateiveistic speeds. For the split second that I do get the plane in vew, I can allmost see inside the windows. I dont have a DSLR so I cant take pics with my telescope. The burst feature would be -very- usefull.

That's high *relative* speeds.

Any pilot traveling at high relativistic speeds on final is going to lose his license.

 

[Turbinator]

That is a serious typo.

 

[Unstung]

I was trying to point my telescope at planes that are on final, visible from my bedroom. So I am dealing with very close distances and high relateiveistic speeds. For the split second that I do get the plane in vew, I can allmost see inside the windows. I dont have a DSLR so I cant take pics with my telescope. The burst feature would be -very- usefull.

Can't you use your telescope to calibrate the area where the plane will land, and then capture the next one on the same approach using a high shutter speed without following the plane? I've done some high-speed photography with my point-and-shoot before, it's just timing. You don't need a professional dSLR that shoots 10 frames per second. Eventually you'd get the shot.

 

[Turbinator]

Unstung, that is an excellent idea, however;

How would you mount, and focus a non-SLR camera to a telescope?
Specifically, any camera that has a non-removable lens?

 

[JEL]

Do a google search for "compact camera mount for telescope" to get ideas. You'll get both commercial products and ideas on how to make home-made contraptions. Use googles image search to get a lot of pictures of various setups. A good way to spark ideas

The focusing is probably going to be tricky. I guess manual focusing is pretty much the only way. I don't think an auto-focus will be stable enough. I've tried holding a handycam (video) up to my spotting-scope's lens and with that combo the auto-focus was not able to do much.
Do you have any settings on your camera to switch to manual focus? Buried in some sub-menu or something. Or maybe just some way of turning off the auto-focus so it won't zip back and forth but remain fixed at one setting, cause then you might be able to do the focusing on the scope.

If you could switch to video and use a high shutter-rate that would probably be the easiest way to get some good pictures. But then you would ofcourse have to edit the single-pictures out of the video-sequence later in some editing program.

Alternatively there are also special web-cams one can buy that are made to fit directly into the eye-piece socket on telescopes, but they're obviously not cheap so perhaps not the best option.

Last option is to hand-hold the camera when the scope is set on a fixed position. That IS possible, although obviously not the most fun

 

[Turbinator]

I have one of these, and after searching Google, creating a custom mount would be super easy, and cost me less than $2. However I can not shut off the auto-focus and it has no burst mode. However it does have a complete set of independent shutter, iso, and exposure settings.

Then I have this one, it has excellent video quality and options, including manual and no focus. However creating a custom mount for this one would be complicated, and expensive. Buying one even more so. This is because I cant just...... wait a second. It has a lens mount, for attaching a wide angle lenses. I could buy a step-down ring and a SLR telescope mount.

 

[JEL]

I hope I'm looking at the right camera, because then you should have all this:

Check page 29 of the manual for the P850:

http://resources.kodak.com/support/pdf/en/manuals/urg00422/P850_GLB_en.pdf

It says you can set manual focus

And check page 30 for burst-mode options

And on page 77 it says there's also a lens thread inside the lens ring, so it should be just like on your video-camera

 

[Poscik]

Visit http://extremespotting.com There you can find airliners in flight over Poland, and also ISS!

 

[squeaky024]

Very nice pictures indeed, it's hard to take a picture of something moving at 300 knots.

 

[ky]

Great Pics!I can see planes with my binoculars which are Bushnell Ensign 7x35.Yes I know it's old but it still gets the job done.

 

[Turbinator]

Optics are optics, it's not like they reinvented glass between when those Bushnells where out, and now.