RE: [APML] O.T. Best Web Cam? - (Was: Best WebCam?)

["Gene Horr" <genehorr@houston.rr.com>]

I've been watching over the shoulder as Quentin Hinds has been
doing his imaging <http://www.quentinhinds.com/mars2003.html>.
There are several very good images that have not been posted
yet.

Some items of note:  The best images by far came from a ST-10.
The problem is that to the best of his knowledge there isn't
any way to automatically register the frames.  I think that
MIRA used to have this capability but a short search couldn't
come up with the message.

The webcam images were pretty bad, but you could run the
acquisition for several minutes and come up with thousands
of images.  The software available will cull those for the
best frames, then automatically register and stack.  Even
though in those several minutes you could acquire a better
set of images from an SBIG camera with the high speed readout
and USB interface, the post processing was such a royal
pain in the rear that it wasn't worth it.

Once you have the stacked image processing counts for a _lot_.
The raw image from the web cam still looked mediocre.  So
I wouldn't discount the STV based upon your experience.  Even
Quentin's images at first were nothing to write home about.

But a big difference is that you are getting tricolour from
a single frame with the webcam.

One aside is that I am trying imaging with a 3-chip video
camera to see how that compares with the 1-chip webcams.
If we ever get clear and steady nights again I'll post
a quick comparison.

One processing trick that Quentin is using is to split the
image into the three colour channels, process each one
separately, then combine.

Gene Horr
genehorr@texas.net



-----Original Message-----
From: astro-photo-bounces@seds.org
[mailto:astro-photo-bounces@seds.org]On Behalf Of steve banbury
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 3:09 PM
To: Discussion of Film Astrophotography
Subject: Re: [APML] O.T. Best Web Cam? - (Was: Best WebCam?)


At 03:35 PM 9/11/03 -0400, John  wrote:
>
> Question- What would be better for imaging planets, a web cam, or an SBIG
> STV?


Hi John--Results other folks have posted were WAY superior to what I've been
able to achieve with the STV.
But it could have been my own incompetence.
I'll let you know how it goes with the webcam I just ordered.

Steve
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