New to astro imaging with a webcam, got some questions

[eye-to-the-sky]

Recently got my hands on a Philips SP webcamy thingy after reading some rave reviews on it on various sites, all good so far, finally got all the adapter and filter bits for it and 'modified' my focussing tube cap to accept the 1.25" adaption, tested it in daylight, all good, tested it tonight, still good but ............. trying to process the images is a bit of an issue for me at the mo'

exactly what version of Registax should I be downloading ? there's loads, well 6 as far as I can tell but do I start at 1 and download all the updates or go straight in at 6 ?

Have I even got a decent enough image to put through it, jupiter is pretty white in the video and stills capture, ok its very white.

Are there other programs out there, preferably free, that come with any kind of recommendation ?

Are there any idiot guides on the web, now that would be particularly useful to me, hope someone can clear the fog a bit,

cheers

Graham

[Merlin66]

On the registax 6 website there's a couple of good tutorials, well worth starting there.

You can go direct to version6.

[dishmop]

If you have a white blob that's a good first step. Use the white blob to get the best focus you can, nice and sharp, usually the smallest and least fuzzy blob is good. If you've got a tracking mount this will be easy. If you've got a manual mount it'll be a bit more tricky as you'll need to give yourself enough time to handle the focus part while jugging the laptop screen as well.

Once the blob is focused, you'll need to adjust your camera properties. If you're using an image capture program like WXAstroCapture there's a very obvious "video device properties" button to click on.

If you try changing the shutter speed of the camera you should see the white blob start to go away and some of the planet detail coming out. I also drop the gamma slider to zero and the gain to 100%, with brightness around 50%. Experiment a bit with it until you get something that's reasonably bright but still shows up the detail.

After that, you're ready for Registax. Grab version 6. If you're feeling confident, you can apply the update to version 6 as well. Try following the tutorials, although the alignment and stacking should be pretty straight forward, the most important part to start with will be the wavelet section!

Good luck,

[eye-to-the-sky]

Thanks for the pointers so far, after looking at Jupiter I homed in on betelguese as its obviously red and I wanted to try and get a fix on the likeley colour range of the cam, it picked up the colour ok but I wasnt getting a nice round star with spikes, more a red photon torpedo lookalike from a Star Trek battle.

Now this is the bit where everyone probably throws their hands in the air screaming 'why are you bothering' because I'm using an aged Meade 4504 GOTO reflector that I bought years ago when I didn't know any better, in my defence I'm now using this as a test bed to try and get to grips with webcam imaging before deciding whether to take the plunge with something altogether more appropriate.

Back to Betelguese, I suspect the thing might need colimating so thats the next part of the learning curve, once I've figured out how to get images up on here I'll post my initial attempts for amusement / disection