Digital afocal photography

The advent of digital single-lens reflex camera and, moreover, compact point and shoot digital cameras has made the afocal method far more popular since this type of camera is small enough to mount directly on to telescopes or other devices, is for the most part a solid state device with minimal moving parts, has auto focus, has auto exposure adjustment, has some capacity for time exposure, usually has a zoom mechanism to crop vignetting, and has a video screen on the back side of the camera so you can actually see the image hitting the image plane.3 A whole new industry has sprung up selling couplers and other devices for mounting digital cameras afocally. Simply holding the camera up to the eyepiece and snapping a picture can obtain usable results. Most popular types of consumer digital cameras have non-removable lenses so afocal photography is also the only method available for these types of cameras