This just happened last night – live streaming madness!

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The setup - Zhumell Z10 10 in. Newtonian reflector telescope, Logitech C250 CCD webcam (modified), old laptop.

I tested out my modified Logitech C250 webcam + telescope combination on the half moon last night. It was uncharacteristically warm (50 F in January!) for Iowa, and a clear night so the conditions were wonderful.

Wow! My web stats showed some amazing stuff last night. A huge thanks to Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer, and Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy blog) and to Fraser Cain (@UniverseToday, and the Universe Today blog) for helping notify the masses of the opportunity! Apparently live video streams of objects in space are pretty desirable? If you watched, did you see the large X that was showing itself where it looked like four crater walls met and had their edges illuminated just right? I would assume that has a name, but I have no idea what it is. You can visit the Ustream channel to review the video(s) if you like.

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I thought this X-shaped illumination of crater walls was cool and kept going back to it in the camera's FOV

Again: wow.

We’ll have to do this again.

3 comments on “This just happened last night – live streaming madness!Add yours →

  1. Nice pictures. I’ve only just strtaed astronomy as a hobby, with an Orion XT10i Intelliscope. Its a Newtonian Reflector on a Dobsonian base, which I am starting to discover makes astrophotography a little difficult since it does not have motors to enable equatorial tracking. Still I am able to take some photos and use K3CCDTools to take AVI’s and Registax to stack the frames and improve the photos. They are not bad results, but your photos of Mars and Jupiter are very nice, some good detail in Mars particularly, which I understand can be a bit difficult to photograph. I too use a webcam, a Phillips SPC900NC which is a similar spec and sensitivity to your Toucam, except I think mine allows the modification for the Steve Chambers long exposure mod to be made even easier, due to a redesign of the circuit board which brings the required connections away from the chips which are so tiny it makes soldering to them difficult on the Toucam. I have yet to make the SC LX mod, but I chose this webcam because of the ease of doing it.

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