First try, a complete failure!

[JR1987]

I bought a genuine toucam off ebay a couple of months ago but only recently bought the adaptor for it to fit the scope... As its starting to become jupiter season again I decided to have a go at imaging it.. (Ive waited a long time for it to come back round since the planet made me fall in love with astronomy this time last year!)

Id only ever tried snapping it with my DSLR as im a (new) deep sky imager. 

Tonight I set everything up and shamefully. After achieving what was focus... all I could get was a bright white disk in the camera.. aswell as moons if i moved the shutter up (im using a program called Macam for Mac) 

I tried putting in the eyepiece and I could only really get a bright disk in that too, early this year I could clearly distinguish the red cloud bands. 

Could this have been down to seeing/treacherous wind conditions etc etc?? 

I was so hoping to get a real image of jupiter tonight, After seeing what people are taking at this time of year, Id love one to call my own!

P.s Im using a Skywatcher explorer 200pds.

[mwayne]

Sounds like the gain is too high for the focal ratio you are using. No such thing as failure with planetary imaging, you just found out how not to do it next time. Keep at it and good luck!

[MarsG76]

I agree, sounds like you're overexposing Jupiter.. if you either decrease the gain or even increase the shutter speed you should stars seeing the cloud bands.

[PeterCPC]

Yep, just keep trying. It's better to underexpose than overexpose. Keep the gain as low as you can get away with.

Peter

[Steve Ward]

Overexposing for sure , but with the Toucam you want the GAMMA setting as low as possible and the GAIN quite well up for best results ...