help with philips spc 900nc cam

[mr saddo]

Hi there all, i bought the spc 880 kit flashed to 900nc from Morgans, i put the camera in the focuser and i cant get a image, just blackness! the camera is working, but do i need a barlow? or what setting do i need in sharpcap? i am using. I tried it at the moon, very disappointed. I am using it on a heritage 130p. even tried reducing the focal length of the tube. yours Paul.

[MorningMajor]

Hi

I think there are many of us in the same boat, here's some advice i've given on the subject myself though I am really a newbie to it, but I am slowly managing to capture the occasional useable image-

After my first disastrous attempt when I could see nothing, I got my scope out on Saturday afternoon and focussed it on some treetops and then put in webcam and realised that what the cam picked up was not what I saw through the EP. It all came down to alignment - so I centred object in a 25mm EP - then used a 15mm EP re centred and then again with a 9mm - re centred and then I found that my laptop was seeing the same as the cam.

I also practised focussing and realised again that I didn't have to re adjust the focus "too" much - I think the night before I'd turned the focussing so far that I was miles out. When trying again, any more than 2 or 3 twists on the focus knob meant that I wasn't lined up properly.

Did you try getting something like the pleiades which obviously has loads more stars in close proximity to each other so you may "stumble" across one?

Anyway, good luck, I hope I've helped and it's not the blind leading the blind - let me know how you get on!

[beamish]

There's a fair bit to be said, some of which has been metioned but, think of your w/cam in terms of a short focal length eyepiece to start with.

Your scope and finderscope need to be pretty well co-aligned to help.

Try first of all to find a nice bright star and get that centred neatly in the finderscope, having done that check the alignment thru an eyepiece and again centre and if necessary adjust to get the finest alignment you can between the two -the point being that if you then centre the object in the finder there's a much greater confidence in having the object appear on the chip when you put the w/cam in. BUT before you do that work your way up from say a 20mm up to a 10mm then to an 8 or 6mm ep, once it;s centred you can then gently remove the ep and replace it with the w/cam. Then it's to the settings crank up the gain and lower the frames per sec and possibly even the exp just so you can get an appearance of the object on the chip- remember how small the chip is ! then gently and slowly move the focuser -you may see some rings or a vague blob , that'll be your object. By altering the focus you'll be able to tell if the object is coming into focus or out just by whether the ring/blob gets fainter( out of focus) or brighter and smaller. keep going until you have a very bright disc on your screen and then centre it again-trust me you'll need to !

Then it's back to settings and start playing around with the exp/gain and fps until you're happy with what you see, and record.

Given the narrow field of view w/cams are certainly better for planets/moon then for DSO's -which to be fair would need to be very bright ones and your cam modded for long exp to get anything worth looking at cos the live view of DSO's in a w/cam won't be great at all

HTH

[mr saddo]

HI, ahh yeah i forgot how small the chip is i had a go with the scope in kitchen with a torch lit up in the dark at other end of living room, i picked it up eventually i had to turn the camera and focus to find light off torch, i stripped down a barlow and screwed the nose piece in to that taking the camera higher up, thinking it was to close to the secondary mirror.

[beamish]

Don't be tempted to use a barlow straight off. Practice on the Moon ( nice big target ! ), when you use the barlow eg 2x, you effectively make your FOV 1/4 the size so finding a target is even harder !

Ther are loads of Google pages on w/cam imaging and some Primers here at the top of the Imaging Boards

[mr saddo]

Update, finally got moon tonight, took me ages to pick it up, had to un screw focuser ring right out and shorten truss tube on heritage 130p to get good focus, .The camera on its own in my scope the moon was very magnified, must be the short tube newt.

[red dwalf]

don`t forget that the webcam sees the object the same as a 6mm eyepiece, so it`s a very little fov to start with and adding a barlow will make it alot smaller and harder to get an image

[neil phillips]

Getting the finder Aligned is only really important as far as getting the object in the eyepiece, as long as the object can be got in the eyepiece even rough finder alignment will do. as mentioned start low say 40mm eyepiece then work up, a couple of other tricks is up gamma to full to see the out of focus rings. another is to put the webcam in without barlow, centre it then add a barlow, and it should be real close, likely on the edge of the chip, but with gamma up, it should be seen, drop gamma to image easy