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The Webcam!


The Orion Skyview Pro 8 EQ Reflector Telescope

This page is intended to be both a review of the Orion Skyview Pro 8 EQ telescope as well as a place to put any decent pictures I take through it.


Contents:

Skyview Pro 8 EQ First Impressions
The Glamour of the Moon
Planetary Wonders
Toucam Pro Madness!
*Telescopic Microscopy???


(* Denotes work in progress.)


Toucam Pro Madness!

I love digital cameras, I can't deny it. This is why when I got a Philips Toucam Pro II webcam for the telescope, I also had in mind a million other uses for it. This is a really nice camera as webcams go. The image quality is really nice, the light sensitivity is marvelous, it's tiny and light, has a built in microphone, yadda yadda. It's a good cam, leave it at that. I use it with my microscope, as a webcam, for taking quick pictures of various things, etc, but the main reason I got it in the first place was for the telescope. "A webcam for a telescope?", you say? "But of course!", I reply. Webcams, especially of the recently designed variety, are excellent for planetary astrophotography, and in some cases will do for stellar photography, lunar photography, etc. Basically anything reasonably bright. What made me choose this particular camera, however, was all the online discussion on QCUIAG about modifying the camera to do long exposures. That's right, actual long exposures from a webcam. What this means is that the shutter stays open until you trigger it to process the CCD data, be it 10 seconds, 40 seconds, 120 seconds, whatever. CCD imagers are much faster than film in this respect, so that 2 minutes for a CCD is roughly like 20 minutes for typical film.

Before the camera arrived, I had done all the research, laid in all the parts I'd need, and practiced a little with micro-soldering on an old modem card. The work doing the modification was said to be difficult, and so I wanted to be ready. Difficult... Lol, they described it as difficult. In truth, I've seldom been so agitated as when I set down to do the actual real thing. This was far beyond difficult, this was harrowing at least. The chip that I had to solder wires onto was a tiny surface mount thing, and I had to file my soldering iron tip down to a wicked needle point just to get it in there. Even then, my shaking hands and rattled nerves made me slip a few times, and after all the madness I was SURE it wouldn't work, ever again hehe. And of course, at first it did not, but not because I failed. Rather, the trigger lead going to the external switch was picking up powerline radiation, causing it to trigger at a 60Hz rate. I solved this by damping down the sensitivity with a resistor to ground, and was amazed when I found that this mess actually did work as advertised. Without this modification, the camera will go down to about magnitude 4, but with it it will easily do magnitude 7. With my Orion Pro 8 EQ, I am seeing results down to about magnitude 10 or just fainter.
Now, I want to say a few things here. I won't do this kind of mod again any time soon, it's scary as hell because it is just too easy to screw up in too many ways. Maybe if I didn't have the loss of the price of the camera to worry about, but no way can I afford to destroy $120 worth of camera without a big pain in my head resulting. Second, this is not exactly what I would call user friendly to operate. In normal mode, the camera runs as always. In long exposure mode, the video goes black until you throw it back into normal mode. With bright nebula like M42 or perhaps objects like M13 or M31, this is easy enough because you will see the object flash on the screen as the single long exposure frame gets dumped to the computer. With faint objects, however, you really have to be on the ball. A split second flash of a nearly invisible fuzzball is not enough to get you through the 20 or so pictures you'll need to stack to get a reasonable image. You need to have a clock drive running, and you need to make sure your object stays in view during the entire photographing session. Even worse, the camera isn't sensitive enough by itself to show your dim objects in normal mode, so you end up having to guide it by brighter stars that happen to be in the frame. M42 was easy, because it's so bright, but when I did M51, I about had a stroke it upset me so chasing it around.

So anyways, I'm not sure how I like it. It's neat, but it's an awful lot of hard work setting up, placing the object properly in view, tracking while you shoot, and processing the result into something legible. That said, it's also extremely rewarding after all that hard work to say to yourself (and others!), "Look what I did!", hehe. Oh, and of course, this mod is a great way to take shots of Aurora or constellations. Point the camera at the sky and shoot, and say "Screw you!" to the telescope. Much easier.

My last comment, and I hope by now you've felt the negative vibes emanating from my keyboard, I in no way intended for this page to be a tutorial on the mod. All I ever intended this page to be was a "See what it's good for and yes it can be done" kind of thing. I don't want to lay it all out here on how to do it, and I don't really remember all the details now anyways. I also don't want any responsibility for someone killing thier spiffy new Toucam. If you want to do it, then go see the QCUIAG people, because that's how I learned to do this. There's plenty of information to be had. Anyways, hey, if you DO decide to give it a try, then maybe my pictures will help you. Good luck!!


Click an image below to see it at full size!



More to follow,
NightRunner!