FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Webcam Mars from Tucson Sunday Night

[Andrew Cooper <acooper@xxxxxxxxx>]

This time I setup to try my hand at a webcam photo things turned out
much better. It helps that Mars was not jumping about the frame like a
blob of jello.  The first time I setup last week the equipment was
running great as I figured out how to use the software, but I didn't
even think about processing what little material I did save to disk.  I
did store a few sequences of Mars and the Moon, as a great example of
bad seeing!  The scintillation of Vega also makes great video.

Has anyone considered analysing the optics of the telescope by using a
webcam at high power and stacking a stellar image to view the airy disk
and diffraction rings?

Last night the seeing was OK, but not great, maybe a 6 with a bit of 7. 
So I shot sequences of 600 frames at 1/1000 of a second hoping to freeze
what movement there was.  The resulting image is 500 frames stacked.  I
don't think it is too bad for my first real attempt at this sort of
imaging. I still need a couple things, a barlow, and maybe an IR filter,
but even without it did work... 

http://www.whitethornhouse.com/dropbox/Mars200309072335.jpg

I can't wait for Jupiter and Saturn!

Andrew

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Andrew Cooper
Tucson, AZ
mailto:acooper@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.whitethornhouse.com
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