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Xbox Livecam Mod (Cliff)


gdheib0430

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Here are a few linx for general guidance for using reggie, cool name huh? - to stack and process AVI files mostly, but remember many people swear by AutoStakert!2 for ease and speed for stacking only using reggie for final wavelet sharpening, and maybe photoshop/gimp2 etc to finely tweak it further.

http://www.astronomie.be/registax/linkedwavelets1.html

This will no doubt leave questions and a lot of it I just follow blindly without understanding the tech details but also had some practice at it by trial and error - so whatever I think might help i'l post another time, early start in morning, off to bed.

Take care folks

Aenima

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Hope the links were helpful, I cant remember which one I found most useful - it isn't in the post as I couldn't find it, but the info that IS there in those tutorials covers quite a lot of stuff.

Best thing I think so far - at least for me - is to get the best AVI possible, this should be where you take most care and spend time getting focus as tight as humanly possible ( I have found a bahtinov or lord mask used on a nearby bright star before slewing to jupiter really helps, as you know its right and wont need to go back n forth through point of focus trying to guess the midway distance by going past then bringing it back, with a fuzzy image its nearly impossible to tell when your spot on.

Aim for 10 fps and under a certain overall time to avoid rotation of the planet blurring details after a while, two mins or under is my usual rule of thumb - and that you can trust the 'de-rotate' function in registax, best to make sure to begin with. Sharpcap is free and totally adequate for all captures as far as I know, and you can save one setting for finding the object thats high gain and bright and another for when you have it onscreen and want to start capture, this will have exposure up as far as it goes before it goes red (the setting word "exposure" next to the slider turns red, not the object - :), and gain low as you can get before the image dissapears - gain adds noise, so use exposure to illuminate the planet so the gain can be lowest - and keeping in mind you can bring out some of the darker areas afterwards but cant repair overexposed images as the data is lost , so if in doubt go slightly under with brightness/gain/exposure to be safe.

If the image moves a lot, or there is a section thats ruined by weather or vibration etc then get the free program 'VirtualDub' to edit out the bad bits also to join the good bits together -at this point you might want to use yet another free program called 'Castrator' ( chortle ) which runs through your footage and centers the planet and crops the background so the stacking software likes it better and alignment goes smoother.

And then as said above use autostakkert!2 to analyze and stack the avi which is easy and fast to use, very intuitive interface and gives a stack that goes nicely into registax 5 or 6 for RGB align (this fixes atmospheric difraction, getting rid of the blue and red-ish edge that is unavoidable) then wavelet sharpening, this is best used gently and varies with a persons taste but mostly its best to not go as far as making the image grainy or the red colouring dark, the #2 and #3 sliders halfway up is a good starting point. Maybe click the up/down box up a few notches for each of the sliders that you used...reg6 has sharpen and denoise but reg5 only has one but for some reason a lot of people prefer reg5 wavelets even though they're simpler. Besides, reg 5 and 6 both have a denoise function over the other side of the screen - de-noise/de-ring button - but use carefully as it can lose your detail under all the gaussian blurring.

Wow, sorry. Went on a bit there! I'm hoping that it'll help in the learning curve of planetary webcam stuff in general, especially if you dont like the look of registax interface but need it for wavelets (AutoStakkert! doesnt do after stacking processing) :) )

Anyways, i'll give it a rest now and hope this is useful to someone somewhere.......

Regards

Aenima

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Aim for 10 fps and under a certain overall time to avoid rotation of the planet blurring details after a while, two mins or under is my usual rule of thumb - and that you --'can't'-- trust the 'de-rotate' function (edited, sorry.) in registax, best to make sure to begin with.

Regards

Aenima

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Thanks Aenima. I'm still feeling my way round RegiStax and I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I should have a proper thumb through the manual - if there is such a thing. I still haven't seen the GRS and I'm itching to at least observe this. A half decent image would also be a bonus.

Sometimes, an image will show it just as good, if not better than, through an EP, though with a steady scope and atmosphere, and a comfortable viewing position like a chair you should be able to view the red spot by eye with your scope - 10mm eyepiece + x2 barlow - though to be sure of a good chance of getting the timing right, a quick look on stellarium will show if the spot is visible at a paricular time.

Regards

Aenima

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Cliffcam still scanning them skies :) i love this cam still.

Taurus!

205441_10151325174762288_1423707844_n.jpg

Thats a great image of all those objects together - jupiter, aldebaran, pleiades in the same shot. Nicely captured. :)

BTW did you see any meteors this week, Cliff? I was keeping an eye out for them but saw 5 the whole week :( - thats not much better than the normal rate for random shooting stars.....

oh well, maybe next shower will see some.

Regards

Aenima

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While I was waiting for Mrs WaveSoarer to get home from Oxford, various bus related issues due to flooded roads and the usual hold ups on the A34, I had a go at reprocessing an avi capture from the night of the 18th of November. This time I was a bit overly optimistic and used a 2x Barlow and a 3x Barlow in combination for the capture. The resulting avi was very fuzzy and the final stacked image looked equally poor and fairly blurred so I gave up on it. Anyway, this evening I had a play with wavelets in Registax and, after much nudging of the various sliders, I came up with this. It looks a bit over-processed, and I may have another go at it, but I'm amazed how much detail has been pulled out. I didn't realise at the time that the GRS was actually in view. It's fairly clear in the attached image as is its smaller companion smaller red spot which formed recently. The untreated stacked image, also attached, only just about shows the GRS but only if you know it's there.

post-22790-0-74596100-1354220351_thumb.j

post-22790-0-48335100-1354222386_thumb.j

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Wow, and this was the xbox? Thats a good final image, you could tweak it again from the beginning its nice.

I did just see the red spot before sharpening but its not easy, right on the edge. I have started to find less rather than more working but still trying to get more detail.

There definitely is progress and a learning curve.

Nice 1

Aenima

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Oh right, what telescope are you using ?

I'd like to see a big collection of images taken through a skywatcher 130p but seems no one on here has taken any

I missed this thread last winter - I was following the older imaging with xbox live camera - first pic thread. I confess I've only read half the thread so far!

I've got a couple of Xbox Live Vision images with a SkyWatcher SK1309EQ2 (thats that SkyWatcher Explorer 130M on an EQ2 mount) telescope on my blog, which is almost the same as your telescope.

Here's my first attempt at a Moon Mosaic with Xbox Live Vision (Feb 2012) which I think turned out quite well. I'd managed some Jupiter and Saturn images back then as well, but image capture on Mac OS X was very limiting.

big_mac_moon_v3_clean.jpg

For Winter 2012/2013 I've switched to Linux, and here is an image from my first attempt using wxAstroCapture on Jupiter and four moons (need to work on the capture settings, and then post processing).

Jupiter_20121128_1938_snapshot.png

I'm hoping next time to collect a batch of frames at about this level of gain to capture the moons, and then another batch at lower gain in order to get Jupiter itself with visible rings. I need to work out the best image file formats first (AVI vs FITS) for downstream processing under Linux / Mac.

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OK, as promised, two images of Jupiter, one from the Xbox cam, the other from the Toucam Pro II. You can see the Toucam is more sensitive as it picked up two moons and there is more detail on Jupiter itself. It's obviously the better cam, but it comes at a cost - like the spc900nc and 880nc, they aren't cheap to get hold of, as I found out for myself :huh:. But I have to say, the xbox cam, given it can be picked up for peanuts, has produced a pretty good image and not that far off the Toucam. These were both processed pretty quickly and I'm sure with a bit more effort there and some clearer nights, the xbox cam can do even better. Based on this, I well recommend it for planetary work on the (very) cheap! :laugh:

Xbox:

post-18116-0-17613200-1347912666_thumb.j

Toucam:

post-18116-0-32366500-1347912643_thumb.j

Stunning work - do you remember which telescope you used (I'm guessing the Skywatcher Explorer 200P DS or Skywatcher Skyliner 150P from your signature), and what filters were on the camera, and any Barlow lens?

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  • 2 weeks later...

hi,

i have just ordered the xboxcam from amazon but was wondering if anyone knows how its image quality would compare with that of an in built isight camera from a 2010 macbook pro? laptop is now dead (red wine) so i'm trying to salvage what i can. apparently the chip is easy enough to remove and has a usb interface. maybe a lot of effort for not much image gain.

planning on some taking some moon and planetary pics with my 200p dob.

would appreciate any thoughts.

thanks

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No way. :cool:

Thats awesome, I can see it clearly, better than with my eyes even on a dark night.

Nice1 cliff that cams picking up all kinds of stuff.

Its funny, the other night - 11th I think - I saw 6 or 7 meteors, or shooting stars (same thing I think?) but not leonids, they all came frrom east/north-east sky and quite regularly through-out early morning - not sure if it was part of a shower or just a coincidence but very pretty either way. :)

Regards

Aenima

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hi,

i have just ordered the xboxcam from amazon but was wondering if anyone knows how its image quality would compare with that of an in built isight camera from a 2010 macbook pro? laptop is now dead (red wine) so i'm trying to salvage what i can. apparently the chip is easy enough to remove and has a usb interface. maybe a lot of effort for not much image gain.

planning on some taking some moon and planetary pics with my 200p dob.

would appreciate any thoughts.

thanks

Hi empofant,

If i'm guessing right by the post number - welcome to SGL :)

For all things astro this is a good place to seek advice, there are many knowledgable stargazers here.

First off, the xbox cams are really easy to mod and for the price will give you a good introduction to webcam imaging.

The laptop cam, I would think, is probably way too much hassle to adapt to telescope use and would be unlikely to give any better images than a standard cam but if you enjoy tinkering with that kinda stuff it cant hurt to experiment, though it doesn't sound like an easy task. :)

As for image quality, remembering it's cost, the xbox is quite usable for lunar images, and can pick up some detail on the larger planets, however you'll often find it has trouble with capturing the object's natural colour - this can be tweaked with perseverence and software editing, however, another option is to take monochrome shots, as this allows the details to remain in place without getting distorted by the heavy processing needed to squeeze the colours out of the picture.

Depending on your experience and knowledge of using a webcam for imaging it may be a good move to practice both modding and using webcams in general, and the xbox vision is a perfect way to do this.

In the absence of the popular webcams - ie spc900nc, MS lifecam studio, toUcam or certain logitech models - and on a budget, its a good starting point - if you like it then you can search later on for a 2nd hand philips or mod something yourself . The xbox uses the same 'nosepiece' adapters as the standard spc900nc types so you wont have to buy the whole kit if you upgrade later.

I'll search my cluttered harddrive for some examples of xbox pics if its any help.

Best of luck

Aenima

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I have near finished modding my cameera but not stuck plastic tube on. How long does this need to be please to get a focus. Is it 4"

Baz

Hi, I used the silver casing that came off my Skywatcher 10mm EP (all its really good for haha plus the inside of it is black, i tried it with white pipe first & it was useless.) and just stuck it on with electrical tape, perfect fit for focuser and barlow.
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Hi, I used the silver casing that came off my Skywatcher 10mm EP (all its really good for haha plus the inside of it is black, i tried it with white pipe first & it was useless.) and just stuck it on with electrical tape, perfect fit for focuser and barlow.

BTW, u might struggle to get focus with 4"?
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