Nearing midday today I could hear the local hawks calling to each other, so I decided to try to get a picture of them with my new camera. The below shots are taken at full zoom ! That's 18x optical plus some digital taking it up to about 27x. I just set the camera to automatic mode, point and clicked :) (no tripod, no calculations etc). To give you an indication of sizes and distances roughly speaking the goshawk is about a foot tall in the body, the tree it was sitting in is probably around the70 foot mark, and I would have been that distance again from the tree, so well over 100' feet away anyway.
The images were 2048 x 1536 and I scaled them down to 1280 x 960. There was some noise in the originals that wasn't noticeable once scaled down