Can you do photography with a Dobsonian Telescope?

The short answer is, probably not. The long answer is maybe?

Let’s take a step back.

A Dobsonian telescope is a type of reflecting telescope popularized by famed San Francisco amateur Astronomer John Dobson. They are popular because it is a relatively simple design and usually yields the best “bang for the buck” results for visual astronomy. I have owned 2 dobsonian telescopes in my life, the first being a monster 12 Inch Truss Tube telescope and the current being an Apertura AD8 8 inch dobsonian (I have previously reviewed it here).

Some time ago I wanted to see what results I could get for astrophotography. I have an iPhone holder to theoretically use my iPhone in front of the eyepiece, as well as an adapter to mount my Nikon Z6II 24 MP camera to the focusing tube (to yield a focal length of 1200 or 2400 if I use a Barlow Lens).

First try, lets get the Moon!

I tried capturing the gibbous moon using the camera adapter and Nikon Z6II camera. I then ran into my first roadblock. I could not get the image in focus because the focusing tube on the telescope could not travel far enough inward. I then inserted my 2 inch 2x barlow lens into the focusing tube, and then mounted my camera on it. Success! I could now focus on the moon, but since I had changed the focal length from 1200mm to 2400mm, I could not fit the whole moon in the field of view. I therefore ended up taking 2 images and compositing them in Photoshop (if you look closely you can see the seam about 1/3 up the way in the image where I did the stitching).

Not a bad first effort!

This image is about 5000 x6000 pixels, or 30 MP. You can click into it for more detail. You can also see the full resolution image on Flickr here.

Moon (taken using Apertura AD8 and Nikon Z6II with 2x Barlow (effective focal length of 2400mm)

Let’s try Jupiter

My next target was Jupiter. Jupiter would appear too small at the 2400mm focal length so I decided to use one of my telescope eyepieces (my 6.5mm Baader Morpheus) for an effective magnification of about 184X. This magnification would only work on days of good seeing (few or no atmospheric currents so the image would not be ‘swimming’).

I chose a night with good seeing but it was quite a struggle to even get any image. The exit pupil (the cone of light coming out of the eyepiece) is exceedingly small at about 1mm so I had to mount my iPhone holder to the lens and then do a lot of trial and error. After quite some time I did get a somewhat usable image, but the challenge was that the light difference between Jupiter and its moons was pretty big so if I exposed for Jupiter then the moons would be invisible and if I exposed for the moons Jupiter would be washed out. I ended up with 2 somewhat decent images.

Jupiter and Moons (taken using Arpetura AD8 telescope using 6.5mm Baader Morpheus eyepiece and iPhone 16 Pro)

The photos of Jupiter are underwhelming and illustrate why Dobsonians are not really used for astrophotography. Most people use specialized refracting telescopes (along with really good tracking mounts) to get those stunning images of the planets, nebula etc.

So there you have it. You can do basic astrophotography with your run of the mill Dobsonian telescope but it is pretty limited and there are much better tools for the job.