The moon is a really interesting target for just about any telescope.  Starting with the Meade Polaris 114mm and continuing to the TV 85, each scope improved the view of the moon.  As Chuck began getting interested in astrophotography, the moon seemed like a good first target.  Chuck owned Olympus OM2n camera equipment and started taking pictures of the moon using slide film.  An expensive and not very productive experiment.  You can't see your results until the film is processed, processing and printing is expensive, and the OM2n camera is hard to focus because of the inconvenient angle (you have to lay on your back when the scope is pointing up).  We bought a Varimagni finder and the Olympus 1-8 focusing screen to help but the costs kept mounting and the pictures never really matched what you could see through the eyepiece.

The Nikon Coolpix 4500 fixed all that.  Easy to focus on bright objects like the moon, the camera back can be rotated for convenient viewing of the LCD screen, you see the results right away, and the digital images could be computer enhanced.  

There are only a few pictures of the moon, but our goal is to get a picture for each day of the lunar cycle.

Click any picture for a larger view or click here to browse through the pictures.