Toucam Pro

I am thinking of buying a Toucam Pro , but there are two questions I would like to ask.
When taking a photo of the moon , for example, do I need to take more than one photo.
And, secondly, do I necessarily need a motor driven telescope , to make the telescope move at a constant rate? All I have is a 4.5inch equatorial mount .Thank you very much.
Garry.

Hi Garry,

You dont necessarily need to use stacking when imaging any object.
You can get images of the moon, BUT they will always be better when you use stacking.
I've taken images of the moon/sun using a webcam on an unguided mount and got decent results.

What you need to do is take 5 seconds (for example) worth of bitmap images , then stop imaging, move the scope manually back to where it started and take more images.
Do this for a while and you'll end up with enough images to stack.
The edges of the resultant stacked image might be a bit off, but the majority of the image will be fine, you can always cut off the edges of the images using something like paint shop or photoshop, but it really wont be that bad.

For something like the moon, stacking something as little as 10 frames can make a big differance. !! All you can do is try....

So no you dont needed a guided scope for the moon.

For planets you ideall want to have a couple of minutes worth of images to stack, so having amount that can do tracking is desireable. However it is by no means necessary, since you can just reposition the telescope ever few minutes to get a set of video frames to stack. Persistence is the key! If you are using a barlow lens to get a very high magnification image, the planet will drift out of view very quickly, but it should be possible to get images of the rings on saturn, and the cloud band on jupiter without a tracking mount.

The key to this is with the software which you use to stack the images. It is capable of detecting the planet moving across the video and takes this into consideration while stacking to make sure they are all aligned correctly.

Cheers,
~Al

Message received and I will have a go at that . Thanks



Garry