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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.
Heres the Google Cache
8 C: www.astrosurf.com/cidadao/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:vccbQq0yX5
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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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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.
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.
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.
Of course, this is all theorizing here. I have no experience with astrophotography, and I just learnt about the Bayer pattern recently.
There are a variety of reasons. Colour CCDs don't have the resolution that monochrome ones do. Cost, which relates back to the resolution. Sensitivity to light: monochrome CCDs can be, and often are, optimized for very low light.
With filters it is possible to zoom in on any spectral line you wish, like the red hydrogen alpha line, or the blue-green oxygen line (produced by emission nebulae, which is why the Orion Nebula looks greenish-grey).
...laura