So how much magnification would you get with the J1 on the Tamron 500mm mirror lens and the Kenko 2x teleconverter? Well, 500*2*2.7 …. or 2700mm effective focal length. Since 50mm is approximately a normal field of view, this focal length would amount to something approaching 54x magnification.
That’s actually quite a lot … as much as smaller telescopes can manage. Of course, the optics we’re dealing with here are rather similar to the optics in a typical reflector telescope with 2x barlow … in fact, I’d like to try that out one day.
Anyway … I shot a few images tonight, and one came out especially clear. By that I mean that, despite using self timer with a quality tripod and ball head to hold the whole rig steady, there is always some blur at these magnifications from atmospheric effects. The atmosphere itself has pockets of less clear air, and you have to shoot a number of images in order to get one that is quite clear.
What was really cool was that the magnification is so high that the moon did not “fit” in the frame. When is the last time you saw that :-)
And even cooler was the fact that the moon was visibly moving in the frame. Wow … that’s some kind of magnification.
With the J1, I was able to magnify my view pretty much to 1:1 on a small crater and get it perfectly focused. I’m really glad that I read that in Thom Hogan’s excellent guide to the Nikon 1 System. If you own these cameras, you ought to have a copy of this guide. It is an inexpensive PDF download, so you have no reason no to own it.
Nikon J1 + Tamron BBAR 500mm Mirror + Kenko 2x TC 400 iso f/16 1/40
The contrast is not all that high there … so I juiced that up in a few other versions, the best of which is this one.
I’ve never had a shot like this where craters are visible almost to the other edge. This is just so cool
I gotta say that the J1 has opened all sorts of fun doors … extreme magnification is a hoot, plain and simple …
