Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Adapting a Webcam for Astrophotography

Posted by timothy on from the astounding-imagery dept.

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"

4 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. I did remarkably the same thing a few years ago... by EpsilonFour · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  2. astrophotography rules by I+Want+GNU! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Astrophotographers are persistent by Hanno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    --

    ------------------
    You may like my a cappella music
  4. Re:Quickcam? by operagost · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I dunno- somehow he got really sharp, high quality pictures out of it, even though my color quickcam looks like total ass. I'd have to guess it's the crappy lens that's at fault, since he's putting the CCD directly on a high quality telescope eyepiece and getting great results.

    Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.