This week I’m working on a telescope adapter for iPhone. Theres a few telephoto lenses specially made for iphone, but this project uses a beefy 180x telescope. Dwarfing the iPhone in size, the Celestron Firstscope is a reflective telescope that goes for about sixty bucks.

This adapter needed to be able to hold the iPhone above the telescope while the eye piece flush and perfectly aligned with the back camera.

Without an adapter, you can put the camera up to the eye piece and try to hold it steady, but it’s very hard to get a good photo for several factors but mainly because it’s dark outside and the phone easily slides out of place. Tapping or strapping the phone to the eyepiece just doesn’t cut it.

The photojojo lens adapter I designed a few months back allowed me to reuse the iPhone parts and adjust it for the rather large telescopic eye piece. I avoided a multi-piece design and went with a single part that slips on top of the iphone. The adapter has what looks like a cap over the back camera with a hole just large enough for the eye piece. The eyepiece itself just snaps into the cap.

So how well does the iPhone take photos of the moon with the celestron first scope? Pretty good! We aren’t getting full HD resolution, but you can get a good look at details and actually make out the craters on the moon. The view from the lens only allows for capturing square formatted photos, but that’s just enough for an Instagram. Working on the video and full tutorial for this one, so watch out for it this 3D Thursday.