Webcam and the planets

Now here's a picture that surprised me. The top image is taken by a modified webcam :shock: Not sure of the mods but its pretty spectacular. I'm sure the mods will be somewhere on this guy's site

www.pmdo.com/wsc3.htm

But I'm not sure if the webcam you have would be sensitive enough to take anything dimmer.

You're right there - Got the moon again last evening/night , but no image at all with jupiter , even tho' the skylux would show it quite bright and it's moons in it's eyepiece. Oh well , back to the drawing board.

I realise the mods on CCD cams is to give long exposure times - the CCD also operates a lower light levels .
CMOS stands for See Moon Only Son

Another issue I've got is the moon is so BIG , with the webcam on the scope , i cannot get a full image, only segments

It seems to move so quickly too.

I did get a video sequence and am looking at Registrax :lol:

You're right there - Got the moon again last evening/night , but no image at all with jupiter , even tho' the skylux would show it quite bright and it's moons in it's eyepiece. Oh well , back to the drawing board.

I dont think the problem there is that the webcam is not sensitive enough to record Jupiter. The problem almost certainly is that even though Jupiter is centered in the scope it may not be centered on the chip. To be honest I find this the greatest challenge. I suggest you poke around with the scope a bit until you see jupiter on the screen. I have no doubt that the camera will record it if you get the image onto the chip.

Remember the chip is very small indeed. You need careful positioning to get it centered.

Thank Dave. I realise you are right about that - the fact that the moon is so much bigger on my PC screen than in a eye piece must mean that only a small portion of the full image captured by the scope is actually being captured by the chip - now how to centre that part of the image that has Jupiter showing, on the sensor is surely the problem.

I'll try experimenting a bit more at the weekend....

Denis.

What you need Dave is a flip mirror,
It has 2 holders for eyepieces, but you the first with a webcam and the second with an eyepiece.

Center the image using the eyepiece, flip the mirror dial and hey presto, the image is automatically centered in the webcam. This saves me a massive amount of grief and time

What you need Dave is a flip mirror,
It has 2 holders for eyepieces, but you the first with a webcam and the second with an eyepiece.

Yep agreed. What I'm thinking of is getting an off axis guider for deep sky stuff. This can serve the dual role of getting objects onto the webcam too.