What you can do with basic equipment

Me thinks you were spoilt using the 11" scope all the time :lol:
seriously though, it just goes to show that good lunar and planetary imaging can be done with small scopes.

That's a pretty good image of part of the moon - isn't it a graet age we live in that we can do this with 'Standard' equipment

Keith..

Hope fully everyone is suitably encouraged!

As regards the webcam settings I put it at 10 frames per sec and left everything else on auto, again I wanted as little "dave" input as possible.


DaveG

i have a toucam with an adapter which screws in instead of the lens the problem i've come across is trying to focus i dont seem to get a tight focus
i just obtained a 5" reflector (a cheap one but hey it was free)
these were straight into windows as photos not stacked or anything with a lidl skylux. 1st one is mars second is the moon

any advice - the toucam software is switching off the backlight on my laptop so cant use that at present to take vids and stack the images.

Focusing is just a matter of patience. You could get something like the borg helical fine focuser (#7415) which is a cheap fine focuser. Try to concentrate on one particular detail ie a moon crater or the cassini division, tweak see what happens then tweak again.

Sorry what do you mean by a backlight??


Dave Gradwell

Yes focusing is always the most difficult part. One way I sometimes find useful is to locate a bright star (or one of Jupiters moons if you are trying to image that) and set your focus on that. A faint star will disapear when out of focus. I find that you have to focus a bit and then watch for a while as the athmospheric disturbances will do a great impression of mis focusing.

Also I would try the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn, in that order to start with. Mars is just too small now.

Michael.