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This pages shows a beginner's attempts to log and record his first steps in astronomy.
The following three images were from my first night with Meade Electronic Eyepiece - about £90 here in the UK.
I put a battery into the eyepiece and then swapped my zoom eyepiece set at 10mm for the CCD and away it went - immediate images - very impressive. I first fed the output to a TV where I focussed the image; then swapped the input to my laptop PC and took the pictures using a WebCam program I had on the PC - Vega 32 which is free from www.ncare.co.uk/qc/
My Electronic Eyepiece is connected using a Belkin USB VideoPlusadaptor (Belkin Part No. F5U208) to a USB port on my PC. The webcam program will capture both still (jpeg) images and movie (avi) files.
The Meade Eyepiece has following features/constraints
Sensor: monochrome (B&W)
Pixels: 320 x 240 (=76,800)
Variable Contrast Control
1.25" eyepiece holder
Requires 9volt battery
Output: Video cable supplied
The 'seeing' was very poor with thin cloud coverage but even seeing the planets is rare in UK in March! For a first attempt, with what I know is a 'cheap' product, I was pleasantly surprised with the results. I used AstroStack software to add multiple images together - free from http://www.astrostack.com/ (I used version 1 - version 2 is about to be delivered).
Now I have seen that the technology works I will have to improve the technique - as usual, life depends on the weather!!
A
try at Sunspots - very difficult to run laptop in the sun, will have to make a
blackened box for laptop for my next attempts - focussing very difficult.
