I have been studying detectors and image processing in my course lately, and it inspired me to try out an interesting area of amateur astronomy: webcam imaging. The basic idea is to use an inexpensive webcam to take a video of an object, and to then process only the "good" frames from the cheap camera into a quality image. I picked up a Celestron NexImage camera to try this out.
Today was the first day I could see the moon at all since I purchased it. I got in a solid three minutes of observing before the clouds rolled completely over it and began to threaten rain. This meant that I didn't spend any time playing with the settings of the camera. In particular, I ended up shooting at low resolution instead of high res. Just imagine that the image is four times the size... Please remember that these are "first light" results!
As you can see, there is plenty of work to do! Out of the 700 frames I took, only 20 ended up being good enough for Registax processing (typically, one would want several hundred). I dutifully stacked them anyway, and then applied the wavelets and balanced contrast for good measure. It's a poor quality image, but it's a nice taste of what will be coming in the future!
The two craters near the top are (from left to right) Atlas and Hercules. Near the middle of the image, you can see Cepheus above the slightly-larger Franklin.
The most obvious paths to improvement: Turn up the resolution, and Don't try to shoot through clouds!
Shot at f/12.1 on 2006-04-02 9:00pm EDT. Moon at 4.6 days old. Horrible seeing.
Awesome!
Posted by: Jay | April 03, 2006 at 02:56 PM
Very nice. Make more pictures!
Posted by: Erik | April 05, 2006 at 04:21 PM
nice pictures!!
SUPER GEEK
That's awesome, I'm glad you're having a good time with the astronomy you are learning!
I am back in 20 days, but now I am going to rip it up in Costa Rica, I heard you sent me a birthday parcel...
Talk to you soon!!
Love, your favourite sister,
LAURA
Posted by: Laura | April 07, 2006 at 02:59 PM