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

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

Best prime focus results for the evening.

19h40--12V Fan + Peltier - - - - - >	Rotated and enlarged - UNsharpened	Processed in Photoshop	Processed in Photoshop

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

I prefer to experiment with prime focus images, since it is easy to focus and fast to process.

			Relatively featureless compared to the 6V pictures immediately below
18h08--NO cooling	18h12--NO cooling
			Only a little better image quality than no cooling
18h38--6V Fan only	18h40--6V Fan only
			Only a little better image quality than 6V in row immediately above
18h58--7V Fan + Peltier	19h08--7V Fan + Peltier	19h11--7V Fan + Peltier
			Significantly better image quality than 7V in row immediately above
19h19-9V Fan + Peltier	19h23--9V Fan + Peltier	19h25--9V Fan + Peltier
			More 9 Volt Peltier cooled images of Jupiter. Focus slightly off for last image in row.
19h26-9V Fan + Peltier	19h28--9V Fan + Peltier
			Slightly more detail than 9 Volt Peltier cooled images above
19h36--12V Fan + Peltier	19h40--12V Fan + Peltier	19h42--12V Fan + Peltier
			More 12 Volt Peltier cooled images of Jupiter. Exposure time 1/50 seconds for this row of Jupiter images only. All images above 1/25 sec.
19h48--12V Fan + Peltier	19h50--12V Fan + Peltier	19h50--12V Fan + Peltier

The following factors might cause me to make inaccurate or even wrong conclusions.

• Between 18h06 and 19h50 Jupiter's altitude changed from 54 degrees to 42 degrees. So stricktly speaking, the images done earlier should be slightly better since Jupiter is higher in the sky.

• Astro. twighlight only ends at 18h58 - many of the earlier images were done in twighlight.

• All images were not focussed exactly the same. For example, the 7V Peltier images above might be a 'victim' of bad focussing.

• The astro. seeing changes during the evening. For example, the 7V Peltier images above might be a 'victim' of bad seeing as well

• The telescope might be at a better temp. equilibrium earlier at night. Within the first hour of darkness temp. falls quickly and image quality might degrade somewhat. However, several hours later the image quality will be very good - when equilibrium is reached.