One of the pleasures of living in the midwest is sharing our backyard with a pair of cardinals. Virtually unknown in California, they are fairly common here. Cardinals are very shy birds, but I think I’ll be able to get some decent photos using the technique illustrated in the photo below. Known as afocal photography, this simple but effective technique involves first pointing a telescope (in this case, a medium powered Meade 70 ETX) at the object to be photographed, and then taking a picture through the telescope’s eyepiece. The quality isn’t as good as using only one (high-powered) lens, but it’s much better than I can get with just my digital camera alone.
