Playstation Eye Mod for astrophotography

[DAKz]

OK I wanted to chime in here, because I have the same scope (PowerSeeker 127EQ Telescope)
And Since I am just starting to do images wanted to get in on this thread.
I took a webcam laying around the shop (I am bench tech at a computer shop)
Removed the lens, mounted it to a pill bottle, mostly because of the size, it's a perfect fit for the 127.
hooked it up to the laptop, no special software just the free software "Yawcam" for web cams,
No adjustments to the software at all really, pointed it at the moon, and captured about 2 minutes of the moon, the raw capture is not great, I did a rough focus of the scope and proceeded with the software and laptop once I saw the homemade cam was working.
All in all I like what I have setup for hardware, not just have to refine the effort and get a moon filter or change the exposure, got about 3 different software packages to test more with, but got to say that for the $0 price I have in the hardware, I am ready to get this thing up and going.

[JamesF]

These look like single frames.  Is that correct?  If so then a good next step would be to look into stacking longer capture runs.

James

[knobby]

Nice start, try lowering the exposure a bit.

what are you using to process the avi.?

try Auto stakert or Registax

[DAKz]

yes these are single frames I took from about 2 minutes of capture.

This was more of a test of the webcam that was modded to see if it worked I had no astronomy software and the only imaging software I usedf was yawcam a very basic webcam software. Since then I have gathered a lot of the software to make this better, but for first raw images I was please with these.

[JamesF]

Yup, I think for single frames they look promising.

AutoStakkert!2 and Registax are the commonly-used tools for stacking (and either way, Registax for wavelets afterwards).  The learning curve is quite steep, but they really make a massive improvement in the quality of the images you can produce.

James

[DAKz]

Now the laptop has registax 6, wxastro capture, sharpcap 2, MaxIm DL, AVS Video editor,  VideoPad Video editor, Adobe Photoshop. Understand the images were only a hardware test to see if the sony playstation eye cam would work with the hardware, on both ends, the 127 eq, and the sony vaio laptop, the images next time will be better now that I know the hardware works.