On your budget, I'd suggest you consider a Philips SPC900NC webcam (the successor to the popular Toucam). It's $100. It comes with software. You can use various free stacking software. There are loads of sites that coach you on the easy mods you can make to the camera itself. You can't do extremely long exposures, but you can get a lot of good experience and great pictures.
Maybe you want to do quantitative photography rather than just pretty pictures? Think about doing amateur spectroscopy. You can pick up a Rainbow Optics grating for $250. All the software you need is free. It and the Philips, and an inexpensive scope and a cheap mount is all you need to detect the composition of stars that are many light years away! Light pollution and "aperture envy" are minimal.
Or, (and I doubt this is what you had in mind either) consider solar observing. (You don't have to sacrifice your sleep for it!) I the past few years, Coronado's PST (for $600) has made good solar observing possible on a budget. You can use the Philips camera on it too.
Yes, these are all somewhat different answers than what you were looking for. But, it's where I'm focusing my time now.
Good vendors: astrovid.com, OPT, Company7.
I emailed the principle researcher on this project, asking him what was novel about his approach, since amateurs have been "stacking" images for years. Below is his response:
From: Craig Mackay [mailto:cdm@ast.cam.ac.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 5:20 AM
Subject: Re: What's new with Lucky?
Dear Tom
Thank you for your message. What is new about this (and gets rather lost with the media coverage) is being able to use lucky imaging on a much larger telescope. With a 2.5 meter telescope we are able to use typically 10% of the images. With a five meter telescope and four times the area we would be able to use only 0.01% of the images, a completely useless fraction! For the first time however we have managed to do it by using an adaptive optic system in front of our lucky imaging camera. That is what is new and that is what has made all the difference. The AO system gets rid of the larger scale low order turbulent distortions leaving lucky imaging to work on the higher frequency ones which it does rather well. Hence the new image quality which is twice as good in terms of resolution as Hubble, something that has never been achieved before either from space or from ground.
If you look on the lucky website you will find a lot of information about amateur lucky imaging for which I have a very high regard.
Best wishes
Craig Mackay.
Question: What are you doing to make FF more friendly to Joe Sixpack, upon whose interest your growth depends?
Answer: In light of the fact that FF 2.0 broke several add-ins and did NOT warn me BEFORE installing, I'd suggest the answer is, "Not nearly enough..."
Nothing new here.
We did that in 1971 at Tufts University on an IBM 1130. A radio set on top of the console (which I pulled all-nighters to use as a personal computer) could be made to play tunes by various deliberate non-sensical code. AND, as a system op, we could listen to know what the (batch, punched card) was up to...
My first comment here after years of reading: I am furious at the hubris or ignorance that allows this guy to seemingly shamelessly announce that as a leader at Microsoft, his most insightful data comes from a chance visit to a relative... He and his colleagues sit in their little ivory (or is it gold?) towers, hoping that their grandmothers will show them what needs to be done??? "Gee, it's harder than it should be," he says. What a surprise! He and his company's behavior is recklessness on (or over) the border of criminal negligence, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows app: http://www.bwmonitor.com/ has worked great for me for a long time. Obviously, it's just for the current workstation not router.
On your budget, I'd suggest you consider a Philips SPC900NC webcam (the successor to the popular Toucam). It's $100. It comes with software. You can use various free stacking software. There are loads of sites that coach you on the easy mods you can make to the camera itself. You can't do extremely long exposures, but you can get a lot of good experience and great pictures. Maybe you want to do quantitative photography rather than just pretty pictures? Think about doing amateur spectroscopy. You can pick up a Rainbow Optics grating for $250. All the software you need is free. It and the Philips, and an inexpensive scope and a cheap mount is all you need to detect the composition of stars that are many light years away! Light pollution and "aperture envy" are minimal. Or, (and I doubt this is what you had in mind either) consider solar observing. (You don't have to sacrifice your sleep for it!) I the past few years, Coronado's PST (for $600) has made good solar observing possible on a budget. You can use the Philips camera on it too. Yes, these are all somewhat different answers than what you were looking for. But, it's where I'm focusing my time now. Good vendors: astrovid.com, OPT, Company7.
I emailed the principle researcher on this project, asking him what was novel about his approach, since amateurs have been "stacking" images for years. Below is his response: From: Craig Mackay [mailto:cdm@ast.cam.ac.uk] Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 5:20 AM Subject: Re: What's new with Lucky? Dear Tom Thank you for your message. What is new about this (and gets rather lost with the media coverage) is being able to use lucky imaging on a much larger telescope. With a 2.5 meter telescope we are able to use typically 10% of the images. With a five meter telescope and four times the area we would be able to use only 0.01% of the images, a completely useless fraction! For the first time however we have managed to do it by using an adaptive optic system in front of our lucky imaging camera. That is what is new and that is what has made all the difference. The AO system gets rid of the larger scale low order turbulent distortions leaving lucky imaging to work on the higher frequency ones which it does rather well. Hence the new image quality which is twice as good in terms of resolution as Hubble, something that has never been achieved before either from space or from ground. If you look on the lucky website you will find a lot of information about amateur lucky imaging for which I have a very high regard. Best wishes Craig Mackay.
Question: What are you doing to make FF more friendly to Joe Sixpack, upon whose interest your growth depends? Answer: In light of the fact that FF 2.0 broke several add-ins and did NOT warn me BEFORE installing, I'd suggest the answer is, "Not nearly enough..."
Nothing new here. We did that in 1971 at Tufts University on an IBM 1130. A radio set on top of the console (which I pulled all-nighters to use as a personal computer) could be made to play tunes by various deliberate non-sensical code. AND, as a system op, we could listen to know what the (batch, punched card) was up to...
My first comment here after years of reading: I am furious at the hubris or ignorance that allows this guy to seemingly shamelessly announce that as a leader at Microsoft, his most insightful data comes from a chance visit to a relative... He and his colleagues sit in their little ivory (or is it gold?) towers, hoping that their grandmothers will show them what needs to be done??? "Gee, it's harder than it should be," he says. What a surprise! He and his company's behavior is recklessness on (or over) the border of criminal negligence, IMO.