First try with XBox Cam + 200P

[jakeybob]

Had my first go at imaging last night. I recently got a Skywatcher 200P scope, then bought an Xbox Live Cam and modded it. I had to insert it as far as humanly possible (so the thumbscrews could just barely hold it in place) in the focus tube in order to achieve focus, but it did work surprisingly well.

These are my first tries at cropping/stacking/processing (Castrator, AutoStakkert2, Registax6 wavelets). I found it pretty tricky with the manual scope (now have GOTO and tracking envy and I think I overexposed most of my Jupiter shots. So, lots to learn, but still pretty chuffed.

[starnut]

The moon looks very good well done

[JamesF]

That's a very good first effort on the Moon. I'd be tempted to back off the brightness or speed up the exposure just a touch to control the blown spots on the left hand side. If you're capturing using SharpCap then you may find the histogram useful for getting the exposure time and brightness right. You want to avoid the graph getting too far over to the right hand side. It needs to stop short of the end.

James

[WaveSoarer]

That's very impressive jakeybob.

[jakeybob]

Thanks for the comments!

I think the blown out highlights on the moon shot are more due to whatever wavelets settings I was using. I pretty much just mashed the buttons until a detailed picture came out The input video was ok for exposure I think.

I managed to tease a bit more detail out of Jupiter by using more frames, but it's still a bit monochromey. Any idea if it's worth turning up the saturation and/or changing the white balance? (I had them set at 53 and 3296 respectively - the saturation I set low as ramping it up produced lots of colour noise, and the WB I set pretty much at random figuring I could fix colour balance issues later). I couldn't pull any colour out of it at all in registax et al ... to the extent that I'm thinking I may have set something to output in greyscale somewhere in the software chain

[jakeybob]

Hi again,

After further fiddling I managed to get a vastly improved shot of the same area of the moon. The shot below is of the same area, taken the night after the shot at the start of this thread. I used virtualDub to crop the avi to be just the few hundred frames near the area I wanted to image, then used Registax rather than Autostakkert!2 for the aligning, stacking and processing. Finally, finished off converting to greyscale (there was a weird purple bloom at the bottom right - a CCD issue?) and applied curves/levels in Pixelmator.