Friday, July 4, 2025

Nikon Lens Scope Converter


I purchased the Nikon Lens Scope Converter to use for three distinct uses, one for astronomy, two, use as a spotting scope for shooting and third, for wildlife viewing. In a couple of weeks, I’ll take it to our beach house rental and look for sea life such as whales and dolphins. I also want to see if I can illustrate the curvature of the earth with photographs of distant coastal buildings and or shipping vessels far out to sea.

What made me interested in the lens converter was the purchase of the Nikon Reflex-Nikkor • C 500mm f/8 Telephoto Lens. It is a lens with the basic construction of a reflecting telescope such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This lens had piqued my interest in seeing just what I could see through it with the lens converter because additionally, it magnifies the lens once applied by a factor of x10.

I had initially read about the Nikon Lens Scope Converter as well as the Nikon Nikkor Reflex C 500mm f8 from Ken Rockwell. The interest in pointing my Nikon D780 skyward has always been one that I wanted to develop and already I had completed my first attempts at Moon photography with my AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 G ED VR FX. However, the Lens Scope Converter will not work with G series lenses due to the mechanical engagement to open the aperture. G series lenses aperture operation is electronic, the application of the Lens Scope Converter is mechanical. There are modification instructions available online to use the Lens Scope Converter with G series Nikkor lenses.

Anyway, I have two other 300mm lenses that I’ll try the Lens Scope Converter with, the Nikkor ED IF 300mm f4.5 AIS and the Zoom Nikkor 100-300 f5.6 AIS. The ED lens has a tripod mount where as the Zoom is a hand held. I’ve tried to hand hold the Reflex lens with no useable results as the magnification is far too great to actually keep a subject in the narrow field of view, steady for any reasonable amount of time. The magnification accentuates movement. 

The Lens Scope Converter is an F-Mount device so I’ll try some of my shorter focal length lenses just for fun.






My Complete Nikon ~ Nikkor Lens Collection

——————————

No comments:

Post a Comment