Jupiter finally moved far enough for me to take a picture. To do that, I’m using the Phillips SPC900NC webcam I purchased a while back attached to my Orion XT6.  Here is the video of my first attempt.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

There were definitely some problems with the video.  The first thing is that Jupiter is over exposed.  That is caused by the poorly layed out GUI of the webcam camera control.  The problem is the shutter speed and gain slider, they don’t have an markings that show the user which way is up or down.  So I set the gain slider all the way left because I could see from the live preview that the right side of the slider produced a higher gain.  The shutter speed slider was already on the far left and I though that the left means a shorter shutter speed.  BUT the setting is actually reversed.  So with both sliders on the left, I actually set it to lowest gain, longest exposure time.

Oh well, I might as well develop the image in Registax to see what it looks like:

Jupiter over exposed, SPC900NC webcam, Orion XT6
Jupiter over exposed, SPC900NC webcam, Orion XT6

 After I found my mistake, I took another video with the shutter speed set correctly. Here is the video:

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

And here is the output from Registax

Jupiter captured with a Phillips SPC900NC webcam on a Orion XT6
Jupiter captured with a Phillips SPC900NC webcam on a Orion XT6

 I’ve darken the picture a bit because it seems to show more detail.  The picture is definitely kind of crappy.  There are hardly any details visible other than 2 brown bands.  What I need to figure out is whether the poor quality is due to something I did wrong or that I’ve reached the limits of my 6″ scope.  It could be that I didn’t focus the scope as well as I could have.  It is not easy to focus a dobsonian scope with the webcam.  If you play the video, you would notice that Jupiter goes out of frame in about 20 seconds.  So that’s the amount of time I have to adjust my focus before I have to move the telescope.

Other reasons could be the light pollution.  Maybe I could get a better picture if I’m at a dark site.  Also I’m not too sure about the seeing of the night.  The video didn’t show too much bluring so I think the seeing was pretty good that night.