All these pictures were taken at prime focus with a 10 inch Meade LX200 GPS telescope and a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000.

This is what I call a 'quick and dirty' webcam experiments webpage.

So you will not find my prettiest pictures here, but experiments I did.

Here are the reasons for posting these quick and ugly pictures on my website as well.

18h36--9V Fan only	18h39--9V Fan only
18h52--12V Fan only	18h55--12V Fan only	18h57--12V Fan only
19h04--3V Fan + Peltier	19h06--3V Fan + Peltier	19h11--3V Fan + Peltier
20h18-4V Fan + Peltier	20h20--4V Fan + Peltier	20h22--4V Fan + Peltier
20h34--6V Fan + Peltier	20h34--6V Fan + Peltier	20h37--6V Fan + Peltier

After last night's successful tests of PC cooling fan only, I decided to switch the Peltier cooling device on tonight.

Each row in the table above has a different cooling setting. First 2 row - only PC cooling fan running, remaining rows with Peltier switched on.

I only tested up to 6 V with Peltier, did not have time to evaluate results while capturing - did not know if it works better the colder it gets. Now that I have seen it works, I will test 7.5 and maybe 9 Volts with the Peltier tonight - I am afraid if it gets too cold, water will condense inside the webcam - on the electronics board - shorting and ruining it.

All pictures of Jupiter above taken at prime focus with a total exposure time 60 seconds.1/25 sec exposures taken.Earliest imaging done between sunset and start of astro. twilight.

Only 15 frames stacked - 5 percent of frames captured - gave better results than any other number of frames. At 20h55 I estimated seeing to be 6 out of 10 using the Pickering scale.

My interpretation of these results:

• 12 Volt PC cooling better than 9 Volts, even if the fan is spinning furiously - vibration does not seem to be a problem
• The 3 and 4 volt Peltier images are a dissappointment. The fan is spinning too slowly to let the CCD cool off.
• The 6 Volt peltier images are much better than the 12 Volt setting with only the fan running.
• The cooler the CCD chip, the better the images. So, webcam cooling has its benefits - even for planetary webcam astrophotographers.

Suggestion: if you want better planetary webcam images, cool the CCD chip with a normal 12 Volt computer fan. Its cheap, easy to implement and results in clearly visible image quality improvements. All you need is a piece of aluminium between the small CCD chip surface and the large PC cooling fan fins square base.

I found someone to build my wedge cheaply so I will post its results here - hopefully soon.