imaging without motor drive?

You're description above is exactly what you got to do with that webcam. I have one myself, and did that a couple years ago to it. To get you out of a bind quickly, use plasticine or Blu-tack to fix the 35mm film caniater to the 'golfball' You will have to test it first, because you have made a slight attachment, you need to adjust the focus of it.

Some links to help:

www.astrosurf.com/cidadao/quickcam.htm (quite long)

www.teamhightower.com/astro/equipment/index.htm (quite short)

Ok, webcam modified, I'll try it out this evening on something easy (the moon), and let ye know how I get on....

Hey Dave
There is a good webcam / Camera capture software call “Astrovideo” from COAA. I think the price is a reasonable 30 Euro, but you can also avail of a thirty day free trial. More importantly it can do drift method imaging with un-driven mounts to give amazing results.

www.coaa.co.uk/astrovideo.htm

Clear skies
Mike

I took a 3 min movie (Mpeg) of Saturn last week just by holding my cam lens up to my scope. I'd love to run it through registax to see what it comes up with. Some of the movie is a bit shakey and other parts are black cuz i was re-aligning.

I'm sure registax would give me a result. I must try it.

As i understand..............the program takes the best frames from a movie and you can stack them.............no matter WHAT method you use?

ok, so status report: it was relativly clear in Kildare last night, between small patches of clouds - however, the wind was very gusty!

I setup my scope, polar aligned as best I can, found out my finder scope was waaay off (must have got a bang in the cupboard). Spent time trying to fix this, but I think the plastic mount it is on is warped, or bent, because no amount of fine adjustment would align the finder with my main scope. In the end, mans best friend, duct tape, held it roughly in position....

Pointed scope at moon, position of moon (very high in sky) meant awkward positioning for the GEM on the skylux. Got it in sights anyway, and then taped the webcam onto the eyepiece holder (having removed the eyepiece). a bit of fiddling with RA/DEC and the moon appeared on my screen - at huge magnification!!!

Ok, I wasn't expecting that the webcam would view things the way I view them through my 4mm eyepiece! This complicated things, as they then did drift very swiftly indeed... Also, i could focus and track the moon, but I found the brightness hard to deal with (it kept burning out detail...)

Decided to try something a bit dimmer - mars, also high in the sky... Aimed the scope as best I could, but could not get it to appear on the screen - my misaligned finder was trying to break my will to live...

Anyway, I was happy that in bad conditions that (a) the webcam worked and (b) I could see things through it. However, it's left me with a few questions:

1) Magnification of image through webcam - is there a way to control this? For example, can I reduce the magnification somehow? Just until I get used to using the setup...
2) Webcam settings - I can vary brightness, contrast, color intensity, white balance, exposure, gain, backlight compensation, etc... Does anyone have any pointers for what way to set these for finding stars/planets, and then imaging starts/planets? (if the settings for the two differ?)
3) Unrelated kindof: what can I use to replace the useless finder scope on the skylux?

Any pointers to info gratefully accepted...

Dave