Supercooled QuickCam Astromomy

flowerp writes "Any serious astronomer would declare you insane if you mounted your off-the-shelf CCD webcam to a telescope in order to watch the skies, but there is a group on the Internet who do just that! They call themselves QCUIAG (QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group). If you think those are just some crazy nerds, watch their astounding footage of planets and nebulae - and reconsider."

Interesting take...

[pease1]

Actually, many serious amateur astronomers have played with webcams over the past few years. I played with a Logicom quickcam on a homebuilt 4-inch Reflector [ladyandtramp.com] a couple years ago. By 2003 I'll have it mounted on a homebuilt 12-inch [ladyandtramp.com] scope to image Mars.

I first played with CCD's on telescopes in 1987. It has come along way since then; in fact some early amateur astronomers turned image processing software developers have even contributed serious advances in image processing.

If you want to hack a really cool system, see how to build your own "Cookbook" cooled CCD camera [willbell.com] and the related Cookbook camera [willbell.com] website.

Ahhh haaaaa....

[moonboy]

Ahhhh....so, supercooling the quickcam is the secret! Stupid me!

;-)

Some nice images there.

[Guspaz]

I particularly like the images of Saturn. Though, I wonder what the images look like raw before they've been post-processed... Regards, Guspaz. PS: Looks like the page's been slashdotted.

too cool

[seann]

This is too cool, I've thought of hooking up my good old SLR to my girlfriends telescope last semister in school, but I never got around to making any mounting brackets.

sweet...

[josepha48]

This is pretty sweet. I wonder if they have thought of selling this technology so that the average 'joe' like me could own one without having to destroy his cam.

I have been wanting a tellescops, but having looked through some of them the images that you get are not always that great. If I could get one of these and could get the images on my computer that would be so sweet.

A new desktop background every night ;-)

On anther note. Their pictures of mars looked blue and red and white. Really unique pictures.