I’ve been experimenting this evening with different lenses in the Xbox webcam. It looks like with a wide-angle lens with a field of view of 160 to 170 degrees the stars just don’t put enough light onto the sensor to be visible above the dark noise, if at all. In fact, whilst I could easily focus on Venus using the stock lens, with a 170 degree lens I couldn’t even find it at all.
I think that means that for a sky camera, unless it’s for somewhere with a particularly limited field of view, this camera is a non-starter. With the wide-angle lens in however it looks like it should work nicely as an analemma camera and that’s what I now plan to do with it.
For the sky camera I think I’m back to my original plan of using an LX modded SPC900.