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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"
You think that's something? I have obtained pictures of the surface of Mars by connecting a light sensitive detector to my Apple IIe that maps it's output to an ASCII-art graphic on the green monitor. It's been doing that since 1988. Of course it may just be a bad display chip.
Of course, with all the politically correct crap they are required to teach, when would they have the time...
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I yam Popeye of the Borg. Prepares ta beez askimiligrated.
Heres the Google Cache
8 C: www.astrosurf.com/cidadao/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:vccbQq0yX5
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Not bad for a guy in his backyard. Wonder if he spies on his neighbours like that.
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When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
What an excellent educational application. It has me thinking of setting up a webcam of one of those not-so-new-fangled Intel Microscope's. Only question is
It also makes me wonder if there is any way for the Joe Q. Average geek to take feeds from some of that old NASA hardware floating about in space and streaming that online.
--- have you healed your church website?
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!
This moon picture is one of the most impressive digicam pictures I've seen.
Shame about the expensive telescope requirement, though.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
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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You may like my a cappella music
Timothy posted a story about this earlier this year. You can read it here.
We actually have a number of articles on our website regarding webcam astrophotography here. There are four articles in all discussing first steps, photomontages, imaging of the planets and more.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I have had 2 quickcams, and the image quality is anything than impressing. The only good thing about it was that there was a program to get the pictures for FreeBSD. Oh and they are cheap too. But wouldn't you rather use a camera with a bit better image quality for things like that?
my sig
Dave's webcam/telescope mod.
And this has been posted on slashdot before, that's where I first found this link. Not trying to karma whore, this is just a great site that deserves mention.
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
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.
I hate to put a dampener on things (this guy has perpetrated a really cool hack after all), but it's no more surprising that you can use a CCD from a digital camera for astrophotography than the widespread use of photosensitive chemicals (silver nitrate et al, IIRC) mounted on plastic film for the same means.
;-).) But astrophotography is rather easy with almost any camera once you have a nice big telescope to sit it on.
Basically, anything that detects photons will do the job. Sure, these photons are quite low-intensity, but that's no problem if you have a nice top of the range Schmidt-Cassegrain to help you along. Just point it at the star, start your motorised equatorial mount and wait as long as it takes for a nice clear image to pop up. (And you can take your time, you've got all night.) And even if this doesn't work too well, you can use photo-editing suites to pick out the finer details you were after.
Again, I'm not trying to steal this guy's thunder. (I'm probably just jealous of his 10" telescope after all
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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This guy has done some great work with his Meade and a cheap little Quickcam.
He's got plenty of information on setting up and processing images including shooting dim objects with the Meade and stacking multiple exposures for better clarity.
Some of his deep sky objects are awesome. I particularly like M57.
speaking to a mixed group of diverse political points of view in a manner so as not to offend anyone.
It has meant this since it's first known published appearance in 1798 when it was coined in order to form a distinction between the American *government* and the American *people.*
A distinction still valid today.
In the 70's the left adopted the term and began to apply it in a reductio ad absurdum manner, but did not, in essence, alter its meaning.
The fact that is now used in a derisive manner not only by the right but by the middle is only an indication of how far the left has pushed the meaning, not that it has essentially altered.
KFG
George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Santa Claus or how the "Pilgrim Fathers" founded America for freedom?
That kind of politically correct crap.
You don't think of that stuff as "politically correct"?
See how well they've done it?
KFG
Before you concider to buy some a telescope , be an informed buyer. Its tricky to buy telescopes (and all the stuff you need to make use of it)
Here is some good stating points.
www.cloudynights.com , great reviews
www.scopereviews.com , also a good review site
also start a subscription to a magazine , I would recomend sky & telescope
www.skypub.com
and visit a local club before you buy.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
linux code.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
People who find this subject intriguing should check out AstroStack.
Would it be possible/practical to somehow gather the images from thousands of these cameras and analyze them for asteroids? Sort of like Setiathome but using images instead of rf. One of the problems in finding asteroids approacing earth is that the number of telescopes looking is pretty small. If the images of thousands of amateur stargazers were able to be compared it might be possible to detect asteroids earlier and maybe a bunch of other neat stuff. I can see that there would be alot of information needed to be able to know where the camera was etc when the image was taken so comparisons could be done but that shouldn't be insurmountable. Difficult but not impossible.
It only has a CMOS chip (not as photosensitive as the Quickcam CCD) but seems to work ok.
http://www.datawhorehouse.com/astro/
The lunar pic is pretty.
There are plenty more astro photo's on the yahoo digital astro group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/
Hey what a great idea. I could finally get those backyard topless sunbathing (insert name of actress here) that I've always wanted. Anyone got an extra space station ticket I could have?
With very dim objects (like most astronomical phenomenon), you tend to get a narrow range of light from them. Thus, you use your color filters to capture it and eliminate the other stray wavelengths. This maximizes amount of light gathered.
Then you can go back and combine the separate images into one 'full color' image, if thats what you want.
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I saw an item on The Sky at Night which detailed the sucesses of cheap digital equipment used for astronomy purposes.
In all the discussions about the lack of cost, and the detail on the final photos, ease of use, etc., nobody actually bothered to mention that....
You'd also need a telescope.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Yes, picture of the moon or some bright planets is an old stuff.
m ) and a lot of others one you can do good deep sky astrophoto.
But picture of faint Deep sky object is some thing that was near impossible 2 years ago without a very expensive astro-CCD camera.
But now with the work of Steve Chambers
(http://home.clara.net/smunch/wintro.ht
with a cheap Webcam
Hi,
you don't need absolutly a telescope.
By using Lens of a regular SLR film-camera
you can some nice pictures of deep sky objects
(the CCD captor is so small than it "multiply"
by 10 the focal of your lens (if you compare with the size of a regular 24x36 film)
Is is astrophotography if you don't do photography - silver halide on plastic/glass?
This is _astroimaging_.
Just a nit, but it is good to use the right terms, especially if you are a geek and want to sound geekish.