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.

		No fan running better than 3 V.
18h18 - - - 3 Volt cooling	18h20 No fan running
		No fan running better than 4 V.
18h23 - - - 4 Volt cooling	18h25 No fan running
		6V fan running slightly better than no cooling fan running.
18h28 - - - 6 Volt cooling	18h31 No fan running
		No fan running better than 7 V
18h34 - - - 7 Volt cooling	18h36 No fan running
		9V fan running better than no cooling fan running.
18h41 - - - 9 Volt cooling	18h44 No fan running
		Both images bad - seeing got worse
18h53 - - - 6 Volt cooling	18h54 - - - 6 Volt cooling
		10 Minutes later - seeing better. Image on right brightened to show moon barely visible in middle right hand side.
19h04 - - - 6 Volt cooling	19h04 - - - 6 Volt cooling

Prime focus; total exposure time 60 seconds. Taken between sunset and start of astro. twilight.

Only 30 frames stacked - 10 percent of frames captured - gave better results than any other number of frames.

My interpretation of these results:

• 12 Volt PC cooling fan did not get dewed or frosted since it only runs slightly less than ambient temp.

• Even at 12 Volt the fan's vibrating motor did not make itself visible in any of the images.

• At the very least, the fan's vibration did not overwhelm the benefit of a cooler CCD imaging chip, however, ... The 3V and 4V fan settings had no advantage. If the fan were not running, the images were better. So 3 and 4 Volts are not worthwhile, however, I can run the fan at 3V for 5 minutes and then switch it off. The frames captured immediately after this will get the benefit of a vibration free camera, and of the VERY slightly cooler CCD chip. I do not think this is worth the effort.

• At 6 or 7 Volts, the results are quite similar compared to imaging without the fan. I captured the images without the fan running immediately after the ones with the fan running. So the without-fan-running images had the benefit of a cooled CCD chip without a running fan.

• The 9 Volt fan running images are definitely better than the ones captured without the fan running. The 9 Volt images of Jupiter are also much better than any other images captured at lower voltage ratings. This setting is a winner.

Lesson: a need a wedge to capture more frames if I want to take beautiful pictures of Jupiter.