Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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...
------------------
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.
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?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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.
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/
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.
-
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.
There is also the issue of picture exposure (especially if the imager doesn't have the capability for a variable shutter speed) and how it relates to the performance of the telescope as well as the seeing conditions under which the pictures are taken.
The calculations are fairly easy, and if anyone really wants to see them I can follow up with an example. I would even be bold enough to say that if you have a good handle on what your telescope can do, you can probably select an inexpensive camera that will give you respectable results for even modestly priced telescopes.
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.