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Xbox Livecam Mod (Cliff)

gdheib0430

By gdheib0430
in DIY Astronomer

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Stargazing_Cliff

Stargazing_Cliff

Posted
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that microsoft lifecam vx-2000 almost poked me finger off ouch trying to figure how to open it.

i will mod it as in windows it gives little bit of exposure time and if click exposure settings few times it kind of gives cam bit more exposure boost little bit magic tricks i know ;)

still havent opened it yet!

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Aenima

Aenima

Posted
Posted

This is a dodgy Jupiter from the wee hours of this morning - not very good but (a) seeing was terrible ( b focus was difficult (wine's fault), I somehow forget about my barlow (wine again) and (d) I was rushing around without really thinking about what I was doing BUT it was with an xbox camera!

post-17151-0-55229700-1350674132.jpg

:)

Its a good pic, esp seeing as you had troubles - also the wine ;) - it would be good to see if the barlow helps. There's detail there coming through but maybe the barlow will mean a bit more and hopefully be easier to process afterwards. :)

Regards

Aenima

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DBushell

DBushell

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Nice. Natural looking image. :)

I found trouble with colour, not sure best way of fixing it. Another way a barlow might be useful....?

They can be stacked in some circumstances. (maths of some kind)

Regards

Aenima

I now have two 2x Barlows that I intend to stack to see how much more I can scrape out of the xbox camera. That is of course when the fog lifts!!

Time to do the Clear Skies dance in time for the weekend!!

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Aenima

Aenima

Posted
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I've read that barlows increase focal length - say bring an F/5 scope up to F/10 or F/20 (x2 and x4 resp.) At the same time let less llight through. But i found that using Barlows to increase the image size is better than zooming in on a smaller one.

Good luck with the capture :)

Regards

Aenima

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DBushell

DBushell

Posted
Posted

I've read that barlows increase focal length - say bring an F/5 scope up to F/10 or F/20 (x2 and x4 resp.) At the same time let less llight through. But i found that using Barlows to increase the image size is better than zooming in on a smaller one.

Good luck with the capture :)

Regards

Aenima

Will post back once the skies clear and her indoors lets me out!!

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  • 2 weeks later...
WaveSoarer

WaveSoarer

Posted
Posted

We don't remember the exact settings as we were in a bit of a hurry at the time. We played around with exposure, saturation and brightness (we think) in SharpCap and collected and we tried to collect 200 images (though it's unlikely we managed to get that many as my old laptop was having buffering issues). We found that hue was best left close to zero as the colours ended up looking odd. We just used the default settings in Registax. The dark areas in the avi were quite noisy and Registax smoothed these out. You can still see some vertical lines in the dark areas which suggests the image could be improved by further fiddling. The scope was also set up with the 3x Barlow and we had tracking going with the dual axis motors. The tracking really helps with focusing etc. I think that more experimenting would help to come up with a optimal settings. We just took lots of avi's with the various knobs teaked.

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Aenima

Aenima

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I find registax cleans up noise well, too, but sometimes to get the best image of the planet the background must suffer somewhat, but if you have paint or photoshop etc. you can flood the area surrounding the planet Black, for a more natural look. This way you can concentrate on getting the proccessing right for the main disc.

If I remember, there is a option on sharpcap to create a small text file containing your settings each time you start a capture - just have to remember which avi goes with which settings. :)

Best of luck with the next session and the weather, too.

Regards

Aenima

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Aenima

Aenima

Posted
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No worries.. :)

My hard drive is in such a state that I wouldn't know where to even look for most of those text setting files. When I do find one I cant be sure that those settings were ones that worked out or not. :embarassed:

One thing I noticed is the fps is 30 - I'm pretty sure it should be set to 10fps as anything more and the file gets compressed losing you some data in the process. I read that for optimum capture (although this is primarily regarding the spc900, usb 1.0 - the xbox may allow faster transfer, so cant be sure here) set the fps to 10 to avoid data compression. I stick to this for both cams but mostly out of blind faith :grin:

All the best,

Aenima

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