All these pictures of Mars 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.

These are the very first webcam images I captured after being nearly a year without a webcam.

The first 2 prime focus images were taken before astronomical twilight ended at 18h48.

Only processing done: K3 ccd tools stacking and unsharp masking.

5 June 2004 at 18:16 25 of 38 images stacked Frames captured for 30 seconds	5 June 2004 at 18:48 300 of 450 images stacked Frames captured for 120 seconds	5 June 2004 at 18:48 Handpicked 150 frames stacked Processed 8 June 2004

Europa is visible at top right, its shadow transit barely visible at top right on Jupiter itself as well.

Note added 8 June 2004: It is not the quantity of frames you stack that count, but the quality - 150 GOOD ones give better results than 300 average/poor one.

Severly compressed screen print from Meridian software. Notice transit of Europa on Jupiter

Taken using Meade 2x Barlow lens.

5 June 2004 at 19:10 250 of 378 images stacked Frames captured for 2 minutes	5 June 2004 at 19:24 400 of 560 images stacked Frames captured for 3 minutes

3 Minutes too long. Causes to investigate smearing: Jupiter's fast rotoation rate and/or field rotation since I am capturing in Alt/Az mode.

I need to figure out using formulas and thru experiments what the longest capture time is - for prime focus, 2x and 3x Barlows

Only processing done: K3 ccd tools stacking and unsharp masking.

Very dissappointing results, even the prime focus picture above shows more detail.

Later during this evening I noticed the collimation to be VERY badly done - however the collimation looks perfect thru diagonal. More about this later ...

5 June 2004 at 19:50 250 of 390 images stacked Frames captured for 2 minutes

Two previous pics taken at 75 percent gamma, this one 50 percent - less gamma better - better contrast.

Frames captured for 2 minutes in all cases.

5 June 2004 at 20:00 75 gain	5 June 2004 at 20:05 50 gain
5 June 2004 at 20:10 50 gain, 40 brightness	5 June 2004 at 20:45 50 gain, 40 brightness, 100 saturation

( Just notice how much the image of Jupiter rotated within 10 minutes - compare left 2 images )

The last picture were created using only 200 stacked frames from a total of 261 frames, all other pics stacked 300 frames from 400 frames in total.

During the last capture, astrosnap gave an error "Erreur d'ecriture dans le flux", so I did not capture the full 400 frames.

After several tries, I figured out it means - Disk Full.

This took an hour to figure out since my French is not good - well sometimes it is excellent ;-)

So I had to try capturing with other software when I noticed these software works, because it writes away data to another hard disk.

By this time Jupiter sank too low on the horizon to continue experiments.

The good thing that happened here was when I replaced the webcam with an eyepiece, I noticed severe collimation misalignment.

Very ugly and quick proof below - collimation looked perfect using the diagonal.

So all pics tonight were captured like this - tomorrow night's Jupiters will be much better.

I fixed the collimation before starting to capture images of the moon.

I fixed the collimation using my Meade diagonal earlier this week. It still looked perfect using the diagonal. However the prism is loose in the diagonal, I can hear it shift around. So I collimated using that. Lesson learnt - I will never collimate using a diagonal again - anyway the collimation should be done using the same optics setup than that used for webcam imaging - and I never use the diagonal for webcam imaging.

I estimated seeing to be a good 7 out of 10 at 1h06 later the evening - very early next morning. Seeing started off at 5 out of 10 at 18h00.

This quick and dirty webpage might look like 'done within 30 minutes' however it took me 3 hours to complete.

The 'few' images on this webpages are the result of spending 3 hours - from 18h00 until 21h00 - to gather the frames.

So in future if you see someone else did effort similar to this one webpage, please note that that person spend 3+3 = 6 hours - literally one full working day to just create that.

I had fun doing it, so it does not feel as if I actually worked.