Mars at close approach is amazing and you can really pick up a lot of detail. Taken with a Philips Toucam Pro webcam (lens removed), a Toucam to 1.25″ adapter, and a 2.5x Meade barlow. The telescope was a Celestron C9.25 with a JMI NGF-s focuser, carried on a Losmandy GM-8. The C9.25/NGF/GM8 combo was amazing for planetary imaging, especially under the still Florida skies I was living in at the time.
Best 200 of 2000 @ 10 FPS
My best Jupiter to date, and probably my best planetary [intergalactic] image so far. Taken with a Philips Toucam Pro webcam (lens removed), a Toucam to 1.25″ adapter, and a 2.5x Meade barlow. The telescope was a Celestron C9.25 with a JMI NGF-s focuser, carried on a Losmandy GM-8. The C9.25/NGF/GM8 combo was amazing for planetary imaging, especially under the still Florida skies I was living in at the time.
Best 200 of 2500 @ 10 FPS
My best Saturn to date, and my favorite planet in the solar system. Taken with a Philips Toucam Pro webcam (lens removed), a Toucam to 1.25″ adapter, and a 2.5x Meade barlow. The telescope was a Celestron C9.25 with a JMI NGF-s focuser, carried on a Losmandy GM-8. The C9.25/NGF/GM8 combo was amazing for planetary imaging, especially under the still Florida skies I was living in at the time.
Best 200 of 2000 frames @ 10 FPS
So… Venus. lol. Despite its brightness, I found it a surprisingly tough target. And I desperately needed an IR filter. Taken with a Philips Vesta Pro webcam (lens removed), a Vesta to 1.25″ adapter, and a 2.5x Meade Barlow. The telescope was an 8″ Meade LX50. Focusing an 8″ f/10 with a 2.5x Barlow, and a webcam, was an absolute beast.
Shortly after I bought my MX7C I read that the hardware in the MX5C and MX516 were the same, and all that needed to be substituted was the CCD chip. I contacted Terry Platt of StarlightXpress and asked if this was the same for the MX7C line of cameras. Happily he confirmed that this was the correct, and I put in an order for a Sony ICX249AL CCD chip directly to StarlightXpress.
Now why bother with a mono chip? Why the heck did I buy a color camera in the 1st place? Well, the convenience of 1 shot color is still a huge plus for me but the possibility of having a mono chip capable of taking more sensitive luminance images to combine with the color data was intriguing. Not having to buy another camera to be able to do this was what sold me on the idea…
