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When I found that my bridge camera could pick up Jupier's moons I was knocked out. i went out the next night to check tehy were ina differnet place, and not just artefacts! I had a very basic 50mm reflector as a kid and didn't get far with it, and this has got me interested all over again.

Since then i've discovered Registax and have managed to image the rings on saturn, M42, plieades and some constellation - the 'easy targets'.

It is 2000mm equivalent with first stage interpolation. I've managed to image sub-20km fatures on the moon so I'm pretty chuiffed, but then I see what others can do... my avatar is a stack of about 9 frames in registax and I think its getting close to what I can achieve that way.

I picked up a Bresser 76mm refractor and I can see things with it, but photographically I don't think I can go alot furher with it than with the camera.

So... (there is a point, eventually) I have gotten myself a second hand Skywatcher150PL, so that I can try some serious imaging. I will be beefing up the tripod a bit.

To start with I want to do the planets (Uranus is my ultimate target for now!) so webscam video seems teh way to go, but I have two questions:

1 - I have real trouble getting registax 6 to be stable under Vista or Windows 8. I can only stack relatively small numbers of small images, should I drop down to Registax 5? Is it true it can cope with 1200 video frames? I find it hangs on 12 still images.

2 - the Philips SPC900/880 seems be hard to get for a reasonable price from anywhere. What easy to source webscams are best to use? Or should i just hack any ahnmdy webcam to have a first try?

Final question/thought - is it me or has it been MUCH cloudier in 2015 than it was in teh first three monts of 2014. There seems to be a haze nearly every night.

Apologies if these questions are answered elsewhere, I have tried google but teh answers I get are all 4-5 years old and I imagine Regfistax has improved and webscams changed since then.

Neil

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Hi

I bought a cheap £4 webcam and whilst our is good enough on the Moon it is poor on Jupiter.

A cheap ok webcam is the xbox one they go for around £5. Certainly something cheap enough to get going with.

There is a long thread on how to mod one.

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/131246-xbox-livecam-mod-cliff/?fromsearch=1

Why not try registack v5 nothing to lose.

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I use windows 8.1 & what i have found is that registax 6 will not do over 500 images ( I tried to stack 2000 images ) what you could do is stack them in stacks of 500 & then restack the images in R6 

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I use windows 8.1 & what i have found is that registax 6 will not do over 500 images ( I tried to stack 2000 images ) what you could do is stack them in stacks of 500 & then restack the images in R6 

Yikes! I find that more than about 8 seems to crash it for me. Sometimes it just refuses to create any alignpoints, or completely screws up the stacking.

As it works for everyone else I'm sure I am doing something very wrong.

I tried AS2! on a two-day moon and got very poor results.

I am a bit freaked as when I first tried registax (with about 5 big moon shots), this is what I got:

592667.jpg

Now, I can't repeat that, even using the same source images.

Neil

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I use registax 6 on my surface pro with 8.1 64 bit, has no probs dealing with 2000+ frames and never had it crash.

However I find as2 much easier to use when stacking and give just as good a result on planets, and then a final tweak in rs wavelets

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