Straightforward, skill-less Philips Toucam stacked image of Saturn

A natural progression after viewing the celestial sites is to think “Cool, wouldn’t it be great to get photographs of that!”. I went through the initial stages of this when a teenager, before the advent of digital cameras and before I had a telescope. Early, ISO 100 slide film, images captured with my trusty Praktica were of easy targets such as the moon (including lunar eclipses) and star trails – both easy to capture from tripod-based static cameras.

With the purchase of a 6″ Newtonian telescope a few years ago, followed simultaneously by the acquistion of a Philips Toucam and Fuji digital camera the realm of cheap and reckless (i.e. take as many images as you want without the prohibitive costs of getting the film developed) astrophotography opened itself up. Early experiments with the webcam and image stacking software captured images of Saturn and Jupiter that were previously unimagined. Alas, time commitments (evenings taken up with house refurbishment work for 5 years mainly) stopped me from pursuing this further, however with a bit more time available the opportunity is there to make a bit of progress.

The image of the magical Saturn is a straightforward stack of a hundred or so webcam images, it’s not fantastic by any standards, but very satisfying to create such an image oneself. You can just aboout make out structure in the rings themselves and some markings on the planet itself if you squint a bit.

Jupiter was the next target. A decent image of Jupiter was obtained, and then (with a longer frame exposure but the same stacking method) one of Jupiter’s four brightest moons and and overexposed Jupiter. A bit of trickery allowed me to overlay the decent Jupiter image on top of the image with the moons to create the composite image below. It was pleasing to then be able to identify the moons using some planetarium software. I tried to capture Mars too, but hampered by poor seeing just ended up with a red blob most of the time.

I’ve still got the trusty Philips Toucam Pro II (840k) and I’m toying with the idea of converting it to give it a long exposure capability, with the stumbling blocks being finding the time to carry out the electronics and finding the courage to risk destroying the webcam in the process. For now, this will wait for another day. In the meantime, it will still be used for webcam imaging of the planets. The obvious aims are to improve upon the images of Saturn and Jupiter obtained and to have another go at Mars and Venus.

Composite of a stacked image of Jupiter overlaid on a stacked image with longer exposure to show the brightest of Jupiter's moons, taken with Philips Toucam