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"

Comments

Even better.

[CySurflex]

but also using an old greyscale Quickcam.

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.

Anticipating the Slashdot Effect ....

[bizitch]

Heres the Google Cache

http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:vccbQq0yX58 C: www.astrosurf.com/cidadao/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Astrophotographers are persistent

[Hanno]

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...

Webcam astronomy has already been on Slashdot

[eap]

Timothy posted a story about this earlier this year. You can read it here.