The Moon at 1000x Magnification (video)

[Mick UK]

This video was shot at 1980 x 1020 on a modded MS Lifecam Studio, using a 5x Tele-Vue Powermate, Skywatcher 250pds scope on a NEQ6 Pro mount.

The conditions last night were a bit on the misty side with only half a dozen stars visible, although the air wasnt too unstable.

I know this video isnt for the purists on here but i think theres a certain charm looking into those lunar craters, wobble n all

Not sure how the specks of dirt got into my camera/powermate but ive since removed them.

The original video was 4.8GB in size and ive converted it for Youtube into an Avi file which is now only 49MB

heres the video on my Youtube Account. (its available in 1080p)

ps, ignore the music, its the first thing i found on youtube to add an audio track to the video :grin:

[Andy Milner]

Love it! Those powermates look good. I'm just about to mod a lifecam studio. Got one kicking around, so decided to have a go at planetary video capture. Looks like the lifecam likes the moon!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Mick UK]

Word of warning when using the Lifecam Studio, when recording it uses a LOT pc hardware to run it at 1980 x 1020.

I actually bought a new pc with a AMD FX6300 6 CORE processor and installed 16 gig of ram, along with upgrading the on board graphics card to a Radeon 6670 and it can still struggle sometimes to record at 1980 x 1020 using SharpCap for recording should you need to slightly over expose the image then it drops to around 20fps.

I also added an after market cooler for the Chip so that i could overclock it from 3.5ghz to 3.9ghz (every little helps )

Its an excellent camera, and i have the Lifecam HD Cinema as well but that only records up to 720p and not 1080p like the Studio.

Heres another video of the same Craters only a bit lower down on them.

[todd8137]

X1000 are you sure

Pat

[Mick UK]

I certainly am Pat, Skywatcher PDS 250 (1200 Focal Length) + webcam (6mm) + 5x Televue PowerMate  =

1200/6 = 200 x 5 = 1000. 

[HumptyMoo]

Nice shots, so clear considering the mag.

Out of interest are you recording to an SSD? you mentioned your PC hardware being taxed at that res, imo it shouldn't be a problem (given the specs you state) except when it comes to dumping it to mechanical disk.

[JamesF]

I certainly am Pat, Skywatcher PDS 250 (1200 Focal Length) + webcam (6mm) + 5x Televue PowerMate  =

1200/6 = 200 x 5 = 1000. 

Gah! No!

Please please please please please forget all about that 6mm rubbish when you're dealing with cameras.  All it serves to do is confuse, as it has done here.

Magnification is a meaningless term when imaging.  If that's 1000x magnification, exactly what is it 1000 times bigger than?  The Moon?  Clearly not.  What if I display your image on a different monitor with a different pixel size?  What if I used a PDS250 and 5x Powermate but with a webcam with a different pixel size?

What the term magnification means when used relating to a telescope is the ratio of the aperture to the exit pupil size.  As there is no exit pupil with a camera, there's no meaningful way to discuss magnification.

However, they do look like very nice crisp images.  Have you tried stacking them?  I reckon you could get some lovely detail by stacking the video sequences and sharpening.  It has to be worth a go.

James

[Mick UK]

Nice shots, so clear considering the mag.

Out of interest are you recording to an SSD? you mentioned your PC hardware being taxed at that res, imo it shouldn't be a problem (given the specs you state) except when it comes to dumping it to mechanical disk.

No. im recording to my Hard drive, Im also running Carte du Ceil as well as the EQASCOM platform and other than the game pad, thats it.

Its recording at 1980 x 1020 fine but bogs down if i need to up the exposure a touch and taken it into the red.

I remember before i bought the MS Lifecam Studio i'd read that they were an extremely component hungry webcam at max resolution which is why i decided too buy the new pc and upgrades.

[Mick UK]

Here you go James, stacked in Registax with wavelets.

[JamesF]

Here you go James, stacked in Registax with wavelets.

Now that does look very nice.  Well done.

James

[HumptyMoo]

The spec you state earlier suggests to me that the bottle neck is your hard drive. There are exceptions in that the software you use (despite your 16gb or ram) tries to also use the swapfile for certain functions.

It seems a bit counter intuitive I know but, I run a core i7, 32gb DDR3 pc1600 ram, NVidia gtx690 with 2x Samsung 840 pro ssd's and believe it or not I have had to create a swapfile for some poorly coded software that seems adamant that it want's disk rather than freely available memory. I think some software just swaps to disk when it wants to change threads rather than use the system memory available.

Anyway, if you don't have an SSD I urge you (very much so) to get one and make it your primary disk, funding allowing. For maximum throughput look into the 250gb+ area. I get sustained 500+MB/sec transfers, although I do use RAM disk's in main memory for heavy functions.

[HumptyMoo]

Sorry that wasn't clear, I use RAM disks for heavy functions 2gb/sec transfers etc, they do not affect or have anything to do with the 500MB/sec transfers of the SSD's.

[JamesF]

I'd suspect that IO would be the bottleneck too.  Mostly what's happening is data is being shunted from the USB interface to memory to disk.  Unless the video codec is being changed at the same time there's probably not a lot of CPU-intensive work going on.  I don't know how FireCapture or SharpCap work, but in my own capture application I don't bother displaying every frame to the user unless the frame rate is quite low to minimise the amount of work unpicking the video codec when the important thing to be doing is pushing data about.

If an application is writing to disk and you have gobs of RAM then a ramdisk looks like a nice solution.  I'd hazard a guess that with 1280x1024 frames you're not going to get a huge amount more than 20fps before USB2 runs out of bandwidth though it may well depend on how well the video codec can compress the frames.

James

[Mick UK]

The spec you state earlier suggests to me that the bottle neck is your hard drive. There are exceptions in that the software you use (despite your 16gb or ram) tries to also use the swapfile for certain functions.

It seems a bit counter intuitive I know but, I run a core i7, 32gb DDR3 pc1600 ram, NVidia gtx690 with 2x Samsung 840 pro ssd's and believe it or not I have had to create a swapfile for some poorly coded software that seems adamant that it want's disk rather than freely available memory. I think some software just swaps to disk when it wants to change threads rather than use the system memory available.

Anyway, if you don't have an SSD I urge you (very much so) to get one and make it your primary disk, funding allowing. For maximum throughput look into the 250gb+ area. I get sustained 500+MB/sec transfers, although I do use RAM disk's in main memory for heavy functions.

Ha!..thank you for that, i will invest in an SSD Hard drive as we speak ...Amazon here i come!! 

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Heres another one ive just Registaxed James.

[JamesF]

Looks very good.  The level of detail is excellent.

James

[HumptyMoo]

I'd suspect that IO would be the bottleneck too.  Mostly what's happening is data is being shunted from the USB interface to memory to disk.  Unless the video codec is being changed at the same time there's probably not a lot of CPU-intensive work going on.  I don't know how FireCapture or SharpCap work, but in my own capture application I don't bother displaying every frame to the user unless the frame rate is quite low to minimise the amount of work unpicking the video codec when the important thing to be doing is pushing data about.

 

If an application is writing to disk and you have gobs of RAM then a ramdisk looks like a nice solution.  I'd hazard a guess that with 1280x1024 frames you're not going to get a huge amount more than 20fps before USB2 runs out of bandwidth though it may well depend on how well the video codec can compress the frames.

 

James

Another thing with mechanical drives is when they hit their cache limit, you get rapid transfers for a period of the cache size and then, throughput will obviously drop down to mechanical limits as soon as that cache is consumed with unique data.

To be fair though, I was making the assumption that USB transfer had occurred already pre processing, USB 2.0 is too slow to tax any modern HDD let alone memory or processor. If this is all being done in real time then USB is the problem, nothing else.

[HumptyMoo]

So how far off is the last image from being able to see the moon buggy? at my scopes limit it is 1.4miles per mm? (from memory, no idea if that's correct ) Love the images, it's like looking out of an Apollo window (I guess )

[JamesF]

So how far off is the last image from being able to see the moon buggy? at my scopes limit it is 1.4miles per mm? (from memory, no idea if that's correct ) Love the images, it's like looking out of an Apollo window (I guess )

The issue there is resolution.  I don't know the figures for the Moon Buggy, but for example it's relatively easy to demonstrate that to be able to resolve the US flag planted on the Moon on the first landing from Earth you'd need a telescope something like twenty-three metres across.  Even Hubble isn't good enough for that.

James

[HumptyMoo]

Ahh ok, just a tad out of my enthusiasm range...The rest of my life grinding a mirror is not on the cards

[Mick UK]

Another thing with mechanical drives is when they hit their cache limit, you get rapid transfers for a period of the cache size and then, throughput will obviously drop down to mechanical limits as soon as that cache is consumed with unique data.

To be fair though, I was making the assumption that USB transfer had occurred already pre processing, USB 2.0 is too slow to tax any modern HDD let alone memory or processor. If this is all being done in real time then USB is the problem, nothing else.

So really, until we find a USB 3 1980 X 1080 Webcam to mod, we are always going to have a bottle neck

Having said that, as is obvious from the video's ive linked, its recording very smooth anyway, but is there anyway of speeding up the transfer of data from the webcam to the pc???

ps..you had me getting a bit excited there as well HumptyMoo about thinking of trying to catalog  every American artifact they've left on the moon!!! :grin:

[JamesF]

So really, until we find a USB 3 1980 X 1080 Webcam to mod, we are always going to have a bottle neck

I think this might be one of the closest you get for the time being.  Bit expensive for a "webcam" though

http://www.firstlightoptics.com/celestron-skyris/celestron_skyris_274.html

There are other manufacturers of USB3 cameras and also some gigabit ethernet ones.  Sadly none of them have "a couple of beers" price tag.

James

[Mick UK]

I think this might be one of the closest you get for the time being.  Bit expensive for a "webcam" though

http://www.firstlightoptics.com/celestron-skyris/celestron_skyris_274.html

There are other manufacturers of USB3 cameras and also some gigabit ethernet ones.  Sadly none of them have "a couple of beers" price tag.

James

I was just looking at a Flea3 8.8 MP Color USB 3.0 but that comes in at around $950 and just as the Celestron Skyris 274 in your link to FLO, they both only give 20fps which seems to defeat the idea of a USB 3 webcam running at 30fps.

I must admit, im very happy with the MS Lifecam Studio and those videos ive linked are only the first time ive actually used the camera so i might be able to squeeze a touch more out of it hopefully.

The videos i captured of the moon were done with a misty layer of cloud cover so again, hopefully i will improve the images a touch more as well as the seeing improves.

Will it be worth my while purchasing a SSD Hard drive as im always going to be hampered by the USB2?

[Mick UK]

Possible contender to be modded? 

Hover Cam 3PO just released this year  so obviously this price will come down  from $299 in the not too distant future.

Sensor Type: 8.0 MegaPixel HD CMOS Optical Resolution: Optical Format 1/3.2" Image Resolution: 2592x1944, 2048x1536, 1600x1200, 1280x720, 800x600 Maximum Still-Image Resolution: 8MP Frame Rate: 3K or 1080P @ 30fps

http://www.thehovercam.com/press/product-information/352-3po

[todd8137]

I certainly am Pat, Skywatcher PDS 250 (1200 Focal Length) + webcam (6mm) + 5x Televue PowerMate  =

1200/6 = 200 x 5 = 1000. 

I certainly am Pat, Skywatcher PDS 250 (1200 Focal Length) + webcam (6mm) + 5x Televue PowerMate  =

1200/6 = 200 x 5 = 1000. 

Your scope would never focus at x1000 Web cams 15mm maybe your scopes practical power is what ?m

Pat

[Cath]

Just been having a play Mike, just wanted to see what detail might be trying to hide in there.

before

after