I bought a Philips Toucam Pro webcam, a 6” Skywatcher Maksutov Cassegrain, FL 1000mm, F12.5, for planetary & moon imaging, an ED80, FL 600mm, F7.5, for galaxies, nebulae, & all things deep sky, and the most important piece of equipment a Skywatcher EQ5 Pro mount & after learning the capture programme, K3CCD, started taking video of the planets & the Moon, with the 6”, & stacking them into a final single image.
I then decided to have the webcam modified, which would enable me to take deep sky long exposures but without guiding, I could only go up to around 30 secs exposure without showing drift in the image, &, anyway, this was not long enough to reveal the glory of the galaxies & nebulae. |
They were idyllic nights, no pressure, with great results …….. as I thought then, loads of noise in the images, but I did not care about that, I was happy.
Ignored the dust bunnies, they did not bother me, i was doing 6 images a night, how good was that! This was a cheap option & it would test how much enthusiasm I had to go further which would lead me into a spending frenzy ……………… for ever, as I now know!! |