Astro Webcam test

So what do you do in this digital age with the excellent lenses you purchased over the years for your 35mm film camera? Well one thing you can do is purchase an adapter from an Australian company that will mate your beautiful Minolta 250mm f/5.6 RF Rokkor-X mirror lens with your trusty Philips ToUcam Pro II Web camera. What you get from that is a very good Web cam with excellent optics for all sorts of uses -- especially in getting "live" images from a telescope into a computer and, potentially, on to the Web.

I did my first test imaging with the rig Saturday night (Feb. 16) with the Moon at waxing gibbous phase. The image shown here (test image #5) was made with at 7:22 PM using my Toshiba notebook computer and Microsoft Vista, CoffeeCup Software's Webcam 4.0, the ToUcam and 250mm telephoto lens . The camera setup was attached to a simple fixed photographic tripod. Looks good! Not quite as sharp as I remember the Meade images, but not bad for a first try! Excellent color and detail. Mount this rig to a telescope with a clock drive and we'll have something!

In late 2004 I began doing some digital imagery, first using the Philips Web cam and my 1,000mm Meade 390 refractor. I was very pleased with the results. I even used the setup to webcast the total lunar eclipse Oct. 27 - 28, 2004 from the roof of Westlake (Ohio) Porter Public Library! My only disappointment was not being able to show the entire lunar disc -- the small size of the CCD chip made for magnified views of the Moon and I was unable to test and correct the setup before eclipse night. It was fun, however, and people enjoyed it (from as far away as Texas), and mine was one of the few "live" transmissions on the Web! Now, with shorter focal lengths and excellent optics, I can image the entire face of the Moon or, with proper filtration, the Sun.

I'll need to do more testing: For one thing, the CoffeeCup Webcam software, though it does have some excellent features, doesn't seem to allow control of camera exposure and the image preview was inaccurate.

Unfortunately the weather doesn't look promising for the Feb. 20 total lunar eclipse and my observatory lacks high-speed Internet connectivity. I may, however, take that fancy new notebook in and see if I can reach my dialup connection toll-free --doubtful-- and if I can, that would open some new possibilities!.