SPC880NC Jups

[TopHouse]

I took delivery of a nosepiecs and a baader neodymium filter this morning, I was determined to give this camera a try no matter what the conditions. I set up tonight, conditions were truly awful, looking at the perimeter of jupiter was like looking at extreme close up of the moon, the shimmering just wouldn't settle. I assumed my captures would be very poor.

Whether down to the neo filter or the difference in camera I don't know, (previously toucam) but the colours seemed more vibrant. I dropped mag down to no barlow and the seeing conditions were drastically improved. So, I did a 90 second capture or two.

I decided what the hell and went back to the x3 tal, the shimmer was still there but I decided to give it a go, also of note was that, for those who are familiar with watching the lappy screen, you get that odd 'wave' where it goes crisp and detailed, the 'waves' were very few and far between. Another observation was that the vibrancy of colour was less with the x3. Even so, i took a couple more 90 second avi's packed up and came in.

Bear in mind here that last week i had a hard drive failure, Registax is just at bare instal, full default settings with no tweaks. I loaded them up and did my bit. Oh, another note of interest, the blue/red edge hazing was noticeably less, less than I've ever seen, I don't claim to know enough to even guess if it's the camera, the neo filter, or just conditions, just a point of note.

So, without further ado, here are the results, one with no barlow, one with x3 tal

[TopHouse]

One strange thing of note, I almost seem to have caught some detail on that moon, it definitely looks different than with my other cam.

[bigal1]

Great images with quite a lot of detail and nice colors , a fine first test i'd say even with the poor conditions you had .

[TopHouse]

That moon on the x3 shot has honestly blown me away! I have NEVER seen a webcam image that's shown a jovian moon like that, and i also can't understand why it seems to have more colour saturation than the overal planet does, a processing quirk, atmospherics or what? I don't know? I do wish though that the x3 version had as much detail as the un barlowed one has the potential for.

[AztecastroMcJ]

Nice images colour and detail looks good

regards James

[milkyjoe]

I have a quick question that's been puzzling me. Please forgive me if this sounds like a dumb question, but from what I gather, to take pictures using these webcams, you fit a nose piece adapter to it and ir cut/neodymium filter and pop it into the star diagonal or extention tube, yes... but, how do get the magnification if no eps are used!?

[MrJulius]

Good question Joe. the way I picture things is that the telescope collects a cone of light, which i view as a circle in 2D if you make a circle with a smaller diameter than the light cone you will get magnification. What you get is a smaller field of view. If you stand outside looking through a frame, then you can imagine that what you see through the frame fill your entire view. Things look larger because you take a little part of the whole picture and fill your entire view with it.

The web camera has a smaller ccd chip(the frame) thus it sees only a small part of the complete light cone(whole picture) thereby magnifies it, atlhought magnification is not the right word for it.

[neil phillips]

Good shot under the conditions, though i reckon 150 secs at this scale wont show much rotation blur, but youll have a lot more frames to play with weeding out the bad ones and having quite few more sharp ones to put into the mix, think of it this way, if you stack 1000 frames under the conditions you speak of, there must be quite a few sub standard frames still in the mix. By getting a lot more frames with a 150 sec capture, most of those sub standard frames will be replaced with sharper ones ( not all ) but quite a lot.

I think the general sharpness and detail will increase if you try this. 90 second captures are a extreme cutdown on time that really would only benefit HUGE scale jupiter shots, at least 10 meters focal lengths, Mike salway says 120 seconds and hes talking those big focal lengths here. At the scale your at, i think rotation blur would be barely percetable, and the advantage of more sharp ( rather than substandard ) frames in the mix would probably increase both your detail and sharpness.

Dont take my word for it experiment with both approaches at these focal lengths compare similar captures ( so its a fair comparison ) and see which shot comes out better with more detail, to be sure do this a few times,

and i think you may agree. you may not, but experimenting is a big part of learning to get the best out of your setup. so why not.

I think its the less of 2 evils at your scale., though i know others who do not. But at the end of the day they will do what they think is best for themselves. Which is what we all do isnt it.

Not sure about needing a neo filter i certainly dont know of any of the top guys using these ( though they all use mono ) if its a advantage then i certainly want to know about it, as im heavily into single shot, now experimemting with RGB too though. but unless this is something that was proven to be a advantage, i would be wary of putting it between my camera

Though of course still worth experimenting i agree. maybe youll be the one who proves it actually is a advantage. Ive read what Baarder say about it, but again i would want that confirmed by others using it. As they want to sell filters

[crowlord]

As I have very similar kit i just got rather excited!

[TopHouse]

Don't trip over your tongue mr crow lol

Neil, as you know, I totally respect your advice with regards imaging and i'll try the longer sessions, re the neo, I can't yet vouch 100% re any difference between using a neo and an IR, I will however when I find time shoot two identical jupes with same camera settings, same avi length and same registax settings but one with neo and one with just IR

since using a different camera, it could well be that which had the effect, but the difference in colour was amazing and it shows most in the unbarlowed shot. Not only that but the unbarlowed one is a contender for my best ever unbarlowed jupiter re colour, sharpness and detail. But the tests will be run lol

[themos]

I have a quick question that's been puzzling me. Please forgive me if this sounds like a dumb question, but from what I gather, to take pictures using these webcams, you fit a nose piece adapter to it and ir cut/neodymium filter and pop it into the star diagonal or extention tube, yes... but, how do get the magnification if no eps are used!?

You don't get "magnification" in imaging anyway. It doesn't make sense because a captured image can look as big as you like, you only have to put your eye closer to it!

Eyepieces are different because there's only one place for your eye to be, at the eyepiece. And then you can calculate a magnification.

Back to cameras: a pinhole camera has no lens at all but it will still form an image. The further you are from the pinhole, the bigger the image (and the fainter). The image size then depends on the distance from the aperture.

When you put a lens in a pinhole camera, what you are doing is creating lots of pinhole cameras. The shape of the glass makes the light from each "virtual" pinhole play nicely with the light from all the others (by delaying the arrival of each wavefront slightly) so instead of a horrible blur you get a brighter clear image. That only works for one "shape" of glass, though, so the lens "focal length"must correspond to the pinhole distance. If you move the sensor closer or further away from the pinhole, the image gets blurred (goes "out of focus"). This does NOT happen in a pinhole camera.