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Adapting a Webcam for Astrophotography
Alien54 writes "Here's a guy who has done well taking digital photographs of the planets using not only a regular digital camera, but also using an old greyscale Quickcam. Lots of pics, of course, and some very nice shots of Mars and all the rest. He also has some higher end gear. See also these other related pages (link 1, link 2, link 3) Also worth looking at is the website of the QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group"
My dad and I made an adapter that would go onto our telescope out of PVC pipe and some epoxy. We would connect our QuickCam (Color) and take pictures of the moon mostly, as the planets were small on it (Saturn's rings were just distinguishable) I have lost the pictures to many a reformat and new hard disk though. Very fun while we did it!
Have you seen many, um, photos of the leonids? How, er, about time lapse videos of them? There are some really cool vvideos here (realplayer, hopefully cool st-stuff from helix will , uh, emerge soon) and here.
More than five years ago I set up a page about how to disassemble a Greyscale quickcam and how to remove the infrared filter from it. The web page of this /. story even links to the old URL. I left the company four years ago and the page was removed from their web server shortly afterwards.
Astrophotographers loved it, though, and a French astro club even recreated the page from a browser cache (!) and put up a backup: How to disassemble a quickcam, even Connectix tech support mentioned it to their users from time to time.
I am still receiving questions about the procedure described on that page, more than five years later...
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Wow, and I thought I was doing well. [piccy]
That picture was taken on a bad night, with an ancient catalogue telescope that has a dirty mirror. The computer used to capture the frames was a pentium 133 running win95. Then put the image together using paint. I've scaled it down here. The camera itself was one of those tiny near-infra red security cameras.
Spot the difference!
It's astonishing the quality amateurs can obtain in their images nowadays. It's approaching what professionals did a decade ago. I was a big amatuer astronomer in the 80's; most clear nights I'd be outside whether it was summer or winter. In the late 80's amateur astronomers were beginning to use CCD's and what was so amazing about that was that in a few seconds to a few minutes you could capture images that previously required many minutes to over an hour of exposure time with film. The resolution was not as good as film or the large professional telescopes, but now it was possible for the backyard amateur to capture images of very faint objects in no time without sitting hunched over your telescope guiding it as exposed the film. I also remember a big discussion in amatuer astronomy whether using CCD's was 'real astronomy' or not.
Why is he doing the color filter thing when high resolution color CCDs are now availble? Is it for clairities sake or something? I know it was neccisary when Greyscale was all there was, but do color CCDs just now work as well or something?
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Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.
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