how many cameras and what are they used for.

hello all,
i was just wondering how many people have ccd cameras and what they use them for. i have an mx516 ccd that needs to be used more often. i have really only used it on the moon so far.
stephen.

hello all,
i was just wondering how many people have ccd cameras and what they use them for. i have an mx516 ccd that needs to be used more often. i have really only used it on the moon so far.
stephen.

Ive a ToUCam pro webcam that gets used anytime I borrow the boss's laptop!

Still trying to get a really good planetary image from it, and haven tried with deepsky obvects.

www.cademuir.net/astro/webcam.shtml has some images Ive taken, and these shots of the mercury transit were done with it too.
www.cademuir.net/astro/images/Merc2-processed.jpg
www.cademuir.net/astro/images/Merc3-processed.jpg

I dont think I can afford to upgrade to a proper CCD camera any time soon.

Just purchased a Philips ToUCam Pro recently.
Allows you to view the objects "live" on your pc which is cool!
Hope to get a televue 3x barlow shortly and get some snaps of mars
for this year's opposition.

Up to now I've used a nikon coolpix 775 attached to the eyepieces
on my lx90. max exposure time is 1sec unfortunately.
Got some nice shorts of the moon and one or two of jupiter with it though.
see the shannonside website for a few of them.

At the moment though i'm not ready for a proper ccd camera.
To make any use of it you need an observatory otherwise the images will
become blurry with any decent length of exposure.

Michael

Anyone here have experience with using a webcam fro astrophotography?
I got the Philips ToUCam Pro webcam which is regarded as the best there is. I tried imaging Mars albeit without a barlow lens and didn't get a satisfactory result. Anyone got any tips??

I got the Philips ToUCam Pro webcam which is regarded as the best there is. I tried imaging Mars albeit without a barlow lens and didn't get a satisfactory result. Anyone got any tips??

You would probably need a barlow alright as Mars is a bit small. And even then Mars is relativly low so the seeing might not be that great. Garbage in garbage out...

Dont know if you saw the article I did for Arcturus, its at www.cademuir.net/astro/cheapccd.shtml (spelling mistakes and all!). However if you have a webcam and are using it there probably wont be much of use to you there.

The hardest part of taking webcam images that I find is focusing the image, and thats the part thats crucial. Once you have as sharp an image as you can get from the webcam the rest is just playing around in Registax or whatever.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to try some images at the weekend. Do you have any images or video online that we can have a look at?

Cheers,
~Al

I took a video clip of the Moon but unfortunately it wasn't far above the horizon. I could see on the PC how the image was "boiling" significantly due to atmospheric turbulence. The video consisted of 151 frames. I aligned and stacked them using Registax assuming the default values. I then processed the result in PSP 7. The result wasn't as good as the images I take with my Nikon digital camera unfortunately . Have a look in the astrophotography section on my webpage for the webcam processed image. www.geocities.com/michaeloconnell78 I would greatly appreciate feedback on this one. Any advice/help you can give me with the settings in Registax?
Michael