ukstitch
<font color=deeppink>I'm not sure I'm quite your a
- Joined
- May 5, 2008
- Messages
- 5,487
As the conversation in the DLP Photo/artwork thread is gradually heading away from DLP and into the realms of general photography, I thought I'd make another thread where we can discuss this, post pictures etc...
To answer PoppyOlivia question about what camera I use for my astrophotography:
This is where Astrophotography gets very different from traditional photography.
The camera I use is one of these:
It's a philips spc900nc webcam - yes, I use a webcam of all things to take my pictures.
The reason I can get photos looking like the one of the moon, is because that camera is attached to one of these:
It's a skywatcher explorer 130 telescope.
Even with those two things though, the pictures are either low quality (much like the Jupiter one in my sig gallery but worse), or only show part of the subject (in the case of the moon, I get a small section of the moon and not the whole thing).
So, what I have to do is either take a video of it in the case of planets (hence why I use the webcam), or take a large number of pictures (in the case of the moon). I then use software to either stitch the photos together (a free program called Autostitch does this very nicely), or to take the best frames of the video and work some mojo that I don't understand on them to produce slightly less blurry pictures
I've got a couple of lenses which can increase the magnification quite a bit, although the telescope has a maximum before it can't focus properly, which is about 260x "real" size (not sure what I used last night, but I can go 3x bigger than that in theory) - I might try and magnify the moon some more if it's clear tonight to see if I can find some interesting craters etc
To answer PoppyOlivia question about what camera I use for my astrophotography:
This is where Astrophotography gets very different from traditional photography.
The camera I use is one of these:
It's a philips spc900nc webcam - yes, I use a webcam of all things to take my pictures.
The reason I can get photos looking like the one of the moon, is because that camera is attached to one of these:
It's a skywatcher explorer 130 telescope.
Even with those two things though, the pictures are either low quality (much like the Jupiter one in my sig gallery but worse), or only show part of the subject (in the case of the moon, I get a small section of the moon and not the whole thing).
So, what I have to do is either take a video of it in the case of planets (hence why I use the webcam), or take a large number of pictures (in the case of the moon). I then use software to either stitch the photos together (a free program called Autostitch does this very nicely), or to take the best frames of the video and work some mojo that I don't understand on them to produce slightly less blurry pictures
I've got a couple of lenses which can increase the magnification quite a bit, although the telescope has a maximum before it can't focus properly, which is about 260x "real" size (not sure what I used last night, but I can go 3x bigger than that in theory) - I might try and magnify the moon some more if it's clear tonight to see if I can find some interesting craters etc
