Category Archives: Astroimaging

Microsoft Lifecam Cinema Planetary Camera Mod

Posted on April 20, 2012 by james

Thanks to the cloud rolling in rather early last night I decided to do the conversion of my Lifecam Cinema for astro use. I was intended to fit it into a Billetparts adapter, but they’re out of stock and I … Continue reading →

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Xbox Skycam Falls at the Final Hurdle

Posted on April 19, 2012 by james

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 … Continue reading →

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qastrocam-g2 — Astro Image Capture for Linux

Posted on April 19, 2012 by james

Today, pretty much by accident, I stumbled over qastrocam-g2. It’s an astro-imaging capture application for Linux. Thus far I’ve been muddling through with SharpCap, which is absolutely no criticism of that application at all. I just really can’t get on … Continue reading →

Posted in Astroimaging, Astronomy, Computing, Linux | 8 Comments

Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 5)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by james

A brief gap in the clouds this evening gave me a window of about five minutes to test out a couple of Xbox cameras under a night-time sky. I took 30 frames of five seconds each, ten seconds apart. Here … Continue reading →

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 4)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by james

The promised instructions on rebuilding the kernel UVC kernel module. Here’s what I did on my Ubuntu 11.10 Aspire 1. If you substitute in your own kernel version number then you should be ok if you’re running other releases. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Astroimaging, Astronomy, Computing, Linux | 1 Comment

Xbox Live Camera on Linux (Part 3)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by james

It seems I made an error in my initial attempt to get the exposure settings working for this camera in the uvcvideo driver. The camera appears to accept a far greater range of settings for exposure than I initially thought. … Continue reading →

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SPC900 Camera on Linux

Posted on April 13, 2012 by james

Because of the problems I’ve been having with the Xbox Live camera with my SheevaPlug I decided to give one of my SPC900 cameras a try. I don’t really want to use these as I had another purpose in mind, … Continue reading →

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Xbox Live Camera on Linux

Posted on April 13, 2012 by james

I’ve been tempted to build a couple of camera projects recently, the first being a camera to capture the images to create an Analemma, which shows the path of the sun through the sky at a fixed time (usually at … Continue reading →

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Focal Ratio and Capture Length for Planetary Imaging

Posted on March 26, 2012 by james

Thus far with my planetary imaging I’ve used capture times and focal ratios just “by the book” without actually understanding how the answers were derived, so I decided it was about time I worked things out for myself. I’ve summarised … Continue reading →

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Notes on Using the SPC900NC for Planetary Imaging

Posted on March 24, 2012 by james

A while back I was looking for information on which codec was best for data capture from the SPC900 cameras and found several web pages suggesting that YUY2 (aka YUYV, I believe) was best on the grounds that it generated … Continue reading →

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