Would like to get into photography

[Owmuchonomy]

Okay, I've bought a cheapo webcam, gouged out its lens and made an impromptu telescope adaptor out of a piece of card.  I've captured a daytime video of a nearby radio tower on the hill through the telescope to test it out.  The image was good and wibbly wobbly, perfect for testing out Registax... except Registax refuses to load my .avi file.  It doesn't throw up any errors, and it's showing the correct number of frames, but it's not showing any image.  Any ideas what might be going wrong?

...or use Autostakkert instead.  Its not fussy about file types and is easier to use.

[SlyReaper]

Welp, here's my first photograph.

Hey, it's not my fault.  There have been no nights between now and when I bought my webcam.  A radio tower will have to do for now.

[SlyReaper]

And since there's no edit button on these forums, here's the photo again without the bizarre greyscale corruption and stripage.

[DaveS]

Once you've clocked up (I think) 250 posts,an edit button magically appears  but it's time-limited.

[SlyReaper]

I don't suppose there's an obvious explanation about why my webcam now captures everything in purple?

[Steve Ward]

Probably needs an IR/UV Cut filter.

[steppenwolf]

When you gouged out the lens, I suspect that you also gouged out the IR filter? Now you are being swamped with IR would be my guess. An external IR filter will resolve this and restore a sensible colour balance.

[SlyReaper]

That would make sense - I used a stanley knife to cut away everything on top of the light-collecting surface, so it's now completely exposed to every photon that hits it, visible or not.  Because the webcam I bought had a tiny lens attached directly to the circuit board, and any IR filters would have been built into that tiny assembly.  It's not one of those old style webcams where the lens is easy to remove.

I'm actually okay with my camera seeing IR light though.  If it's problematic, I can buy a filter later.  But for now, I'm actually intrigued by the notion of capturing images of the planets, including part of the IR spectrum.  It's a clear night tonight where I am, so I'm interested to see what Jupiter and Mars look like when infrared is visible.

[Steve Ward]

Problem is that you will never get a crisp , clear image without the IR cut , you will find that focus is nigh on impossible as the scope cannot bring all the extremes of the spectrum to focus at a single point.

Hence why we all use IR blocking filters ... 

[SlyReaper]

Oh

Guess I bought the wrong webcam.

[SlyReaper]

Fake-edit: I have colour filters in blue, red, yellow and neutral.  Would one of these help?

[Steve Ward]

You should be able to jury-rig a holder from a 35mm film-canister and stick an IR filter in the front of it.

Try 'Boots' for film-cans , the photo dept will have hundreds for recycling , take a selection of round ones as they do vary somewhat.

Or alternatively a 'proper' nosepiece to adapt from Astroboot.

The IR filter is about £20-25 ... 

[Photosbykev]

Fake-edit: I have colour filters in blue, red, yellow and neutral.  Would one of these help?

no, they are white light filters and will all pass IR, you will need a blocking filter

[SlyReaper]

My first try at Jupiter.

Yeah, it's nowhere near as good as what other have been able to achieve.  In my defence, I don't have a motor on my mount.  Anyway, it's far clearer than what I can see at any given moment through looking into the eyepiece, so I'm pretty happy with it.

[SlyReaper]

Thread necromancy!

So, I stuck an infra-red cut-off filter to my webcam, as you guys suggested.  It was second hand, so only cost me a tenner.  Here's my first go at Saturn.

Much better colour balance than my Jupiter shot, this looks like how I'd expect the colour of Saturn to look.  It doesn't look that impressive, but I'm super happy to have captured this one.  Saturn is so hard to find with the webcam!  Can find it very easily with eyepieces, but I plug the webcam in, and it's usually just black space.  But this time, I was able to find it by manually pushing the scope around.

Thanks for the knowledges, guys.  I now officially have aperture fever, because I want to CAPTURE ALL THE PHOTONS! 

[IanWatkins]

And so the slippery slope begins.

Get the book and then you'll really understand what DSO imaging is all about.

Otherwise stick to planetary or lunar/solar work for a while with a quality camera. This can be very rewarding on it's own.

Cheers

Ian