April Sky at Night over Kinver
This month’s report from our local astronomer, Anthalus…..
I finally got a night of clear skies with the moon a decent size (about 5/8s full) earlier this month so that I could test out a webcam that I had modded to fit into an old film canister that slides in where the eyepiece normally goes following the wonderful instructions here http://www.ghonis2.ho8.com/lifecam/lifecam1.html
I am rather pleased with the results so I thought I’d share them and details of the equipment I’d used to capture them.
I have a Skywatcher 200p 8″ Newtonian Reflector Tube mounted on Skywatcher EQ5 Equatorial Mount (around £420), this is at the larger end of amateur scopes and is actually a little too large for looking at the moon and planets as it lets in too much light and makes detail much more difficult to see, I get around this by using something very simple and even better free! I made a cap that fits over the end of the scope tube and reduces the aperture from 8 to 6 inches which makes a surprisingly large
The webcam I used was a Microsoft Lifecam Cinema 720p which I paid about £40 for
.
The drift you see on the videos is caused by the rotation of the Earth as of yet I havn’t forked out for a motor tracking unit which is something you need for trying to image the other planets, I did try to get a recording of Mars but pretty much as soon as I’d lined the scope up it vanished off the screen of the laptop I had the webcam plugged into as its field of view is not as large as you get with a eyepiece.
I used a nice bit of freeware called SharpCap to do the recording and if you are lucky enough to have a motor drive tracking unit you can use another bit of freeware called registax to pick the sharpest frames from the vid and stack them together to bring out far more detail than you can normally see due to the shimmer caused by our atmosphere! Oh and before I forget another bit of freeware called Fraps helped me capture the individual frames from the vid
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |