I took this picture of the moon on the morning of 2/3/02 during full daylight with a completely stock Phillips ToUcam Pro webcam and the Meade 8inch Dob. I have seen some stunning photos on the web done with these very inexpensive digital cameras and I wanted to try it for myself. This was essentially "first light" for me with a webcam.

This moon shot was taken afocal. That is, I shot through an eyepiece on the Meade telescope using a 38mm erfle eyepiece and an adapter made with some pvc pipe to hold the camera steady.





I have tried to get a good picture of Saturn, but until recently have really failed miserably. So far, this is the best I have been able to manage, and is the result of using a different piece of software, K3CCD Tools, to control my webcam. I have Dave Scott from the UK to thank for the kind advice.





Thanks to K3CCD Tools and Dave Scott, I now have a decent shot of Jupiter to share. Not as nice as my Saturn, but better than I have accomplished before.





Using a Celestron Ultima barlow and my TouCam Pro camera, I took this latest image of Mars on 8/16/03. This image is an accumulation of about 400 images stacked and sharpened using Registax.





I tried to take a shot of the Orion Nebula on January 31, 2003 with my webcam, and in one shot, I managed to catch a satellite flying across the face of Orion. I am including a very small animated gif of the occurance here. Just click on the small image to see a slightly larger movie of the satellite. Animated Gif's tend to get pretty large in a hurry, so I tried to make this one as small as possible and still be able to see the satellite. However, I must warn you that the larger animation is pretty big and will take a minute or two to load.






My new SAC8 camera has finally arrived. The learning curve with this camera is pretty steep, but I did capture a couple of pictures that are not too bad. I am still trying to work out the bugs, but I feel that I am making progress.