Cheapie-Cam AstroPhotography
Cheapie-Cam astrophotography!
I shared this w/ my Yahoo Group friends, and thought I ought to share it here as well:
I just got back from the astronomy club meeting and tonight’s presentation was really interesting.
This guy did a presentation on “the latest craze in planetary astrophotography, the ToUcam [by Phillips]. They will show how to use the camera, and how to process the images.”
The toucam is just a webcam that goes for $145 and is only 640×480 (and the guy only used 320×240 mode!). (remember the Aiptek Pencam SD is only $60-$70 and can sometimes be found at wal-mart for around $30 and is 1.3 megapixels)
READ MORE….
I watched this whole presentation and thought “gee, if he can do this amazing stuff w/ THIS thing, just think what I could do w/ the 1.3 pencam!”
Ok, what the gist of the whole thing was, “processing and stacking”. What he did was take video w/ this webcam. He used his laptop to view the live feed before recording, so that he could get the focus just right (an important step, they argued, when I asked about using the pencam without the laptop).
He said the Phillips Toucam is a discontinuted item that is still easily available at many places (including http://www.ScopeTronix.com).
First, he used the camera’s own software to, in live mode, center and focus the image and make sure it looks good (he messed with contrast, color balance, etc.) and then generate an AVI file of about 1400 frames (about a minute of video)… I mean, that’s the example he used.
(I can’t remember the framerate of his camera, or how it compares w/ the aiptek pencams, dvII, etc.)
Then after that, he went into this program which just blew my mind. It’s called RegiStax: http://aberrator.astronomy.net/registax/ (it’s free right now) What this program does is sort through all the images (frames) [in this case, 1400 of them] and discards the worst ones, and somehow using advanced filters and image processing algorythms it combines the pix to come up w/ a higher quality composite w/ surprising detail.
He then went on to tweak the image with the same program using “wavelet” sliders.
In the end, what you have is, say your original was a fuzzy picture of mars, in the end what you have is an VERY surprisingly sharp and colorful image. It was VERY impressive.
M looked online and found other similar programs: unshake, stellar magic, cadet.
I’m waiting for an email back from the club president, as the speaker said he has example photos on his website, but never gave the url. When I get a url, I’ll link to it. The difference between the original and the final are amazing.
In fact, if u go to http://aberrator.astronomy.net/registax/ there’s an example on the front page.
Anyway, I figure, if he can get those AMAZING images from a 640×480 cam set to 320×240 mode, then the 1.3mp pencam might just work wonders!
Just goes to show that you don’t need a thousands of dollars of equipment to do amazing things!