RAYXAR WIDE-FIELD CAMERA
In my WIDE-ANGLE section, many of the images were taken with this rather unique camera I made from a very special lens. This lens was made in the 1950's by "Oude Delft" for Phillips X-Ray machines.
I first saw such a lens being used by my friend Albert Jansen - a retired Astronomer from Holland, who now runs an observatory from his new home in Prince Albert here in South Africa.
It is a 65mm F0.75 lens with a very complicated system of lenses - see PICTURE.
I believe that a third one exists and is being used by the Max Planck Institute in Germany for Meteor Research.
With the help of some medical colleagues, I managed to find one in the "dungeons" of a local hospital - three days before it would have been dumped !
With the last component only 0.8mm from the film plane to get focus it was quite a challenge to make a camera from it. I used an old Minolta SLR that I stripped and kept only the film transport part and designed a case around it with a "docking" station for the lens. SEE PICTURES.
After many trials and many films I finally got it working - even a 1/10th of a mm. too close or too far from the lens, made it out of focus.
The beauty of this camera is that it can reach magnitude 14 WITHOUT a telescope with 800ISO film and a single exposure of 120 seconds in dark skies.