Lunar Imaging with a Toucam Pro 840K

[gfletcher]

Hi Guys

Having only recently acquired a Toucam webcam i am in need of guidance.

Does anyone have a procedure for imaging the moon witha Toucam Pro 840K , i.e settings etc ?

thanks

Graham

[Ant]

Beleive it or not I think it's better to start with a bright star.

Make sure that the star is bang on in the middle of the eyepeice. Use as higher power as you can to ensure that the star is as central as you can.

Then pop in the ToUcam, start with the gain and exposure right up. Then start adjusting the focuser, but go fairly slowly as the star will go from invisible (out of focus) through best focus and out the other way to invisible again in about a 1/4 of a turn of the focuser.

Once you have the star lower the gain and exposure down, and fine tune the focuser. It is a good idea to either mark the focuser or measure that distance that the focuser is wound out - so if you have trouble finding something you can put an EP in centre and get back to near perfect focusing straight away.

Then it's a case of adjusting the gain and exposure for each different object.

Hope that helps a little.

Cheers

Ant

[rawhead]

Don't go faster than 10 frames per second. Use 5fps if the viewing is better.

I have read (please correct me if I'm wrong) that USB 1.1 (which your webcam will use) can only handle these frame rates before using compression. This will effect the quality of the individual frames...

As Ant says, play around with the gain and exposure to get the best looking image.

Make sure you don't have it too bright. This will burn out the detail.

[Viking]

Graham,

Try this tutorial by MartinB.

http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,3523.0.html

John