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Space Science

Adapting a Webcam for Astrophotography 74

Posted by timothy from the astounding-imagery dept.
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"
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Adapting a Webcam for Astrophotography More

Adapting a Webcam for Astrophotography

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  • Even better. (Score:5, Funny)

    by CySurflex ( 564206 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @02:36PM (#5020804)
    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.

  • Public Schools (Score:1, Insightful)

    by OtisSnerd ( 600854 )
    It would be nice to see the grade and high schools do this kind of thing, it would be something they could afford on their pitiful budgets.

    Of course, with all the politically correct crap they are required to teach, when would they have the time...

    ----

    I yam Popeye of the Borg. Prepares ta beez askimiligrated.

    • Re:Public Schools (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by baywulf ( 214371 )
      What policically correct crap are you talking about?
      • Well, in order to save money, the school book publishers combine most, if not all, the school district requirements into a single text book. You now have a science book with everyone's pet science theories in it. The same applies to all subjects.

        The book publishers aren't going to write a book that satisfies the 'creationist' requirements for a few school districts, and only sell a few hundred copies. They will put that into the book they sell to all the school districts.

        ----

        Hell bent on saving the Damned.

      • George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Santa Claus or how the "Pilgrim Fathers" founded America for freedom?

        That kind of politically correct crap.

        You don't think of that stuff as "politically correct"?

        See how well they've done it?

        KFG
        • Your close, but not quite there. PC depends on your perspective. Tradition US beliefs sure what you said is true. From a liberal bent it would be: George Washington chopped down the cherry tree not because he wanted to, but that he was incorrectly indoctrinated by his male dominated society to disrespect the environment.
          Half of what is required learning in public schools on history is watered down, and the other half are the hold over myths such as old George's axe rampage.

          Here's a few more myths to dispell since we are veering off topic.
          In God We Trust. Not the motto our nation was founded on. Added during the cold war to make sure we appeared more rightious. Same goes for the "Under God" in the pledge. The US was not founded by your modern friendly, though annoying, Christians, but by criminals, religious fanatics, outcasts, and profiteers. The settling (stealing) of the US led to the deaths of 20+ million Native Americans (Not to mention the slave trade, but that is full of it's own myths too.) through disease, starvation, murder, and warfare. I might add that's more than Hitler managed to kill.
          I would love to see little tid-bits like that in the history books. Would make History class easier to pay attention in.

          • The settling (stealing) of the US led to the deaths of 20+ million Native Americans (Not to mention the slave trade, but that is full of it's own myths too.) through disease, starvation, murder, and warfare. I might add that's more than Hitler managed to kill.

            I'm sure it is more than Hilter managed to kill, he wasn't particularly interested in killing Native Americans. He did however manage to kill [carpenoctem.tv]6-14 million Jews, and about 20 million Russians. I'm not belittleing the evils perpetrated against native americans, I'm just saying Hilter really was a particularly evil guy.
    • I think it'd be a nice project. Someone should just put a webcam into a lander and send it to the moon. We'd only need a couple of million in launch costs....hmmm...

      Mike
      • we don't really need a couple million to launch it...... did you every watch cartoons. Everyone knows all you need is a really big rubberband and a couple trees to tie it to :P.

  • Anticipating the Slashdot Effect .... (Score:5, Informative)

    by bizitch ( 546406 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @02:40PM (#5020826) Homepage
    Heres the Google Cache

    http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:vccbQq0yX58 C: www.astrosurf.com/cidadao/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
  • Not bad for a guy in his backyard. Wonder if he spies on his neighbours like that.


  • What an excellent educational application. It has me thinking of setting up a webcam of one of those not-so-new-fangled Intel Microscope's [gizmodo.net]. Only question is ... of what?

    It also makes me wonder if there is any way for the Joe Q. Average geek to take feeds from some of that old NASA hardware floating about in space and streaming that online.

  • 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!

  • Nice digicam pictures (Score:4, Informative)

    by mmoncur ( 229199 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @02:48PM (#5020871) Homepage
    This moon picture [astrosurf.com] is one of the most impressive digicam pictures I've seen.

    Shame about the expensive telescope requirement, though.
    • Wow, and I thought I was doing well. [piccy [lineone.net]]

      That picture was taken on a bad night, with an ancient catalogue telescope that has a dirty mirror. The computer used to capture the frames was a pentium 133 running win95. Then put the image together using paint. I've scaled it down here. The camera itself was one of those tiny near-infra red security cameras.

      Spot the difference!
    • Here [rr.com]'s an admittedly large moon "montage" my dad took with an SAC [sac-imaging.com] CCD camera. There are some other pictures he has taken over the years here [rr.com].

      This one [rr.com] is my favorite of the ones up there now but there are others that aren't up there anymore or never were. Including some really nice ones taken with a modified B&W QuickCam probably 4-5 years ago. I'd have to ask him to get the correct dates. He still has the Modified QuickCam but since he got his SAC camera, I don't think he uses it much anymore.

  • astrophotography rules (Score:3, Interesting)

    by I Want GNU! ( 556631 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @02:50PM (#5020877) Homepage
    Have you seen many, um, photos of the leonids? How, er, about time lapse videos of them? There are some really cool vvideos here [space.com] (realplayer, hopefully cool st-stuff from helix will , uh, emerge soon) and here [space.com].

    • Re:astrophotography rules (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's REALLY annoying. Unfortunately, it'll pr-probably, er, catch on. Oh well.

  • Astrophotographers are persistent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hanno ( 11981 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @03:10PM (#5020960) Homepage
    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 [club-internet.fr], 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by eap ( 91469 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @03:29PM (#5021033) Journal
    Timothy posted a story about this earlier this year. You can read it here. [slashdot.org]

  • Webcam astrophotography (Score:4, Informative)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @03:49PM (#5021122) Homepage Journal
    We actually have a number of articles on our website regarding webcam astrophotography here [applelust.com]. There are four articles in all discussing first steps, photomontages, imaging of the planets and more.

  • Quickcam? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Openadvocate ( 573093 )
    I have had 2 quickcams, and the image quality is anything than impressing. The only good thing about it was that there was a program to get the pictures for FreeBSD. Oh and they are cheap too. But wouldn't you rather use a camera with a bit better image quality for things like that?

    • Re:Quickcam? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by operagost ( 62405 )
      I dunno- somehow he got really sharp, high quality pictures out of it, even though my color quickcam looks like total ass. I'd have to guess it's the crappy lens that's at fault, since he's putting the CCD directly on a high quality telescope eyepiece and getting great results.

      Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.

      • Of course, it could also be that the color quickcam's CCD isn't as good as the grayscale's.

        This is actually the case. To be honest, I haven't touched my old quickcams since, oh, probably kernel 2.0.5... but one thing i did notice is how bad the color's images were compared to the b&w.

        It was explained to me at the time that it had more to do with the hardware than the CCD. Since most used the parallel port, they were hampered by bandwidth. Of course, they were expected to give the same color framerate as the b&w cams, so the hardware sends out lower quality frames to compensate.

        As an aside, I used my b&w cam with my celestron refractor to get some pretty neat shots of the moon and such. All of which have been lost... i'm sure their on one of the hd's, but who knows which one...

  • Dave's webcam/telescope mod [demon.co.uk].

    And this has been posted on slashdot before, that's where I first found this link. Not trying to karma whore, this is just a great site that deserves mention.
  • It's astonishing the quality amateurs can obtain in their images nowadays. It's approaching what professionals did a decade ago. I was a big amatuer astronomer in the 80's; most clear nights I'd be outside whether it was summer or winter. In the late 80's amateur astronomers were beginning to use CCD's and what was so amazing about that was that in a few seconds to a few minutes you could capture images that previously required many minutes to over an hour of exposure time with film. The resolution was not as good as film or the large professional telescopes, but now it was possible for the backyard amateur to capture images of very faint objects in no time without sitting hunched over your telescope guiding it as exposed the film. I also remember a big discussion in amatuer astronomy whether using CCD's was 'real astronomy' or not.
  • I hate to put a dampener on things (this guy has perpetrated a really cool hack after all), but it's no more surprising that you can use a CCD from a digital camera for astrophotography than the widespread use of photosensitive chemicals (silver nitrate et al, IIRC) mounted on plastic film for the same means.

    Basically, anything that detects photons will do the job. Sure, these photons are quite low-intensity, but that's no problem if you have a nice top of the range Schmidt-Cassegrain [astrosurf.com] to help you along. Just point it at the star, start your motorised equatorial mount and wait as long as it takes for a nice clear image to pop up. (And you can take your time, you've got all night.) And even if this doesn't work too well, you can use photo-editing suites to pick out the finer details you were after.

    Again, I'm not trying to steal this guy's thunder. (I'm probably just jealous of his 10" telescope after all ;-).) But astrophotography is rather easy with almost any camera once you have a nice big telescope to sit it on.
    • Again, I'm not trying to steal this guy's thunder. (I'm probably just jealous of his 10" telescope after all ;-).) But astrophotography is rather easy with almost any camera once you have a nice big telescope to sit it on.
      Not quite. You need to be careful to properly match your pixel sizes to your optics. If the pixels are too big for the performance of the telescope, then you end up with grainy images even if you are using one of the best telescope in the world. And you need to take into account whether you are obtaining color or monochrome pictures with your camera because that determines what your effective pixel size is.

      There is also the issue of picture exposure (especially if the imager doesn't have the capability for a variable shutter speed) and how it relates to the performance of the telescope as well as the seeing conditions under which the pictures are taken.

      The calculations are fairly easy, and if anyone really wants to see them I can follow up with an example. I would even be bold enough to say that if you have a good handle on what your telescope can do, you can probably select an inexpensive camera that will give you respectable results for even modestly priced telescopes.

  • Why is he doing the color filter thing when high resolution color CCDs are now availble? Is it for clairities sake or something? I know it was neccisary when Greyscale was all there was, but do color CCDs just now work as well or something?

    • Re:why the multi exposure? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @07:46PM (#5022433) Homepage Journal
      I'll take a total stab in the dark: could it be because a color CCD is not actually imaging all the colors at all the pixels? A color CCD uses a Bayer pattern (a 2x2 pattern of RG,GB) and then combines the results. This is why you get moire effect in some images. If you want to do astrophotography, this Bayer pattern stuff could cause problems.

      Of course, this is all theorizing here. I have no experience with astrophotography, and I just learnt about the Bayer pattern recently.

    • Why is he doing the color filter thing when high resolution color CCDs are now availble? Is it for clairities sake or something?...

      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

    • in astronomy, you want your ccd's to gather all the available light for one particular wavelength (or narrow range), generally.

      With very dim objects (like most astronomical phenomenon), you tend to get a narrow range of light from them. Thus, you use your color filters to capture it and eliminate the other stray wavelengths. This maximizes amount of light gathered.

      Then you can go back and combine the separate images into one 'full color' image, if thats what you want.

  • A good site using a Meade and a *Colour* Quickcam (Score:3, Informative)

    by Internet Ninja ( 20767 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @05:06PM (#5021541) Homepage
    This guy [bigfattail.com] 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.

  • Before you concider to buy some a telescope , be an informed buyer. Its tricky to buy telescopes (and all the stuff you need to make use of it)

    Here is some good stating points.

    www.cloudynights.com , great reviews
    www.scopereviews.com , also a good review site

    also start a subscription to a magazine , I would recomend sky & telescope

    www.skypub.com

    and visit a local club before you buy.

  • linux code [crynwr.com].
    -russ
    • You can also found linux code for the Philips family (vesta/toucam) and it's clone here:
      http://3demi.net/astro/qastrocam/doc/
      and sample images are avaible here
      http://3demi.net/photos/astro/
      This program can handle the Webcam with the hardware mod that allow long exposure snapshot.
  • Would it be possible/practical to somehow gather the images from thousands of these cameras and analyze them for asteroids? Sort of like Setiathome but using images instead of rf. One of the problems in finding asteroids approacing earth is that the number of telescopes looking is pretty small. If the images of thousands of amateur stargazers were able to be compared it might be possible to detect asteroids earlier and maybe a bunch of other neat stuff. I can see that there would be alot of information needed to be able to know where the camera was etc when the image was taken so comparisons could be done but that shouldn't be insurmountable. Difficult but not impossible.
    • Actually, they already do. The LINEAR telescope for one and a slew of others. A few are actually designed to scan a major portion of the sky nightly with special high speed ccd cameras. The scope has a special mount to slew rapidly and accurately while the wide field camera system continuously downloads the images to the computer system where the previous nights images are subtracted from the current. Any new objects are immediately flagged and reported. There are several amateur astronomers who have scopes dedicated to doing this. A high percentage of the newly discovered comets are discovered this way also. Actually the number of telescopes currently scannining the sky is sufficient, the real need is computational horsepower when analysing orbital information.

  • Some more pics (Score:2, Informative)

    by kyoorius ( 16808 )
    Here are some more astro pics taken through a telescope using a butchered Creative Lab Webcam3.
    It only has a CMOS chip (not as photosensitive as the Quickcam CCD) but seems to work ok.

    http://www.datawhorehouse.com/astro/ [datawhorehouse.com]

    The lunar pic [datawhorehouse.com] is pretty.

    There are plenty more astro photo's on the yahoo digital astro group:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/

  • I saw an item on The Sky at Night which detailed the sucesses of cheap digital equipment used for astronomy purposes.

    In all the discussions about the lack of cost, and the detail on the final photos, ease of use, etc., nobody actually bothered to mention that....

    You'd also need a telescope.
    • Hi,

      you don't need absolutly a telescope.
      By using Lens of a regular SLR film-camera
      you can some nice pictures of deep sky objects
      (the CCD captor is so small than it "multiply"
      by 10 the focal of your lens (if you compare with the size of a regular 24x36 film)

  • Is is astrophotography if you don't do photography - silver halide on plastic/glass?

    This is _astroimaging_.

    Just a nit, but it is good to use the right terms, especially if you are a geek and want to sound geekish.

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