| Philips ToUcam Pro Project |
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Last month Marcus and I went to the BAA observing workshops, one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in amateur astronomy is pictures of Jupiter and Saturn taken with of all things a web cam, the Philips ToUcam Pro to be exact. (Just changed Laptop, (Compaq EVO 1015V)big problems getting it to work in XP Pro if any one can help let me know! Email me Don’t buy a Compaq EVO 1015V if you want to use the ToUcam (No fix available))  This camera can be purchased for about £39 from any PC shop and connects to your computer/Laptop by means of a USB cable. To get started the only other item you need is an adaptor that screws in to the web cam in place of the lens, and has a 1.25” barrel at the other end to fit in the eyepiece focuser. The adaptor varies in price considerably, I purchased mine for £11:50 including postage from Mike Brown in York, but could cost up to £25 plus postage and packing from BCF in London. Now all I needed was to connect the web cam to the laptop, unfortunately the laptop I use for presentations at our meeting for some unknown reason wouldn’t work properly, so I borrowed one from work and that works well. Next on the list is a clear night that I had free. (These are few and far between on both counts) Finally last Thursday an opportunity arose so I quickly set up my scope and set up on Saturn, I had a full moon, lights from my neighbours lounge, street lights and alight mist to contend with, but un daunted I persevered. Not having any power where I was observing from, I couldn’t track with my scope, so Saturn was whizzing past my field of view at a rate of knots. One cantered in my eye piece, I hurriedly took the eyepiece out and replaced it with the web cam. All of a sudden a big fuzzy blob appeared on my screen, on refocusing the image became smaller and smaller. What I forgot was as I was using the web cam at prime focus I was capturing a very small image at F/10. Undeterred I set the video capture and took about 30 seconds worth of pictures. Looking at the replay straight after the image seemed ok. But I thought I’d have another run, as soon as I clicked on record the computer decided to go into suspend mode because the batteries were now flat. (Apparently the web cam eats batteries) Now the clouds are rolling in I decide to pack up at do some image processing, when I get in. At home on my computer I played the avi file a couple of times and it looked quite good (for a first attempt) Using a piece of software called Animation Shop 3 I looked at the individual frames to try and choose some of the better ones. (The file turned out to be 120 Megabytes and over 900 frames) On trying to enhance the image my biggest problem was image size I didn’t have enough pixels to record any detail, so my next step is to buy a 3X barlow lens which will give me an effective focall length of f/30 and in turn give me better resolution. Below you will see my first attempt, In the original you can just make out an equatorial gas belt and slight variation in the ring system.  Andy Lawes Moon along terminator April 6th  Andy Lawes Latest Image of large sunspot April 5th 15:05 BST  Dave Wright New Laptop HP NX9000 ToUcam works a treat obtained the mars picture below just need to use an f/10 scope with barlow now for better resolution.  Joint ESAS |
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| Last Updated ( Sep 10, 2005 at 02:58 AM ) |
