Hi all,
a very quick report and some shots done with my new Williams Optics Universal Digiscoping Adapter.
http://www.william-optics.com/wowebs.../feature0m.jpg
Out of the box, was very happy to see anodised aluminium and the camera base was abs plastic. Very solid looking, but light. The toucam and adapter felt slightly lighter than the 2" ultra wide i have!
Big problem straight away. Went to screw te toucam in and oooops
http://www.telescopes-astronomy.com....toucam840k.jpg
To get to the female thread to screw your tripod or the male thread into, the base you see above has to be moved thru 90 degrees to nestle into the back of the camera. Unfortunately, there is a fairly large lip that now protudes down and this means the thread on the adapter can't reach the toucam.
Out came the 8" crescent side cutters and wham, the problem has gone. Not an issue for me as i don't care what the base looks like, but if you don't want to cut it, then it aint gunna work.
The unit was very easy to use. The modded toucam screwed in and i was able to align the toucam with the lens. I first focussed my eyepiece with the crayford and then attached the adapter. There is enough room to then manually focus the toucam via the lens. I left the rubber on the eyepiece to help with blocking out any other light.
Played with the 40mm eyepiece and then went to the 25mm.
Took a little while to get the software settings for toucam right, but after a while, I was looking at my laptop screen and viewing a very good aprox of what i see in the eyepiece.
I switch over to longer exposure, put the cover over the telescope to take a 10 sec black shot (900K)
http://www.precons.com/iis/gallery/I...k10secs001.bmp and had a go at the lagoon nebula.
I tried two exposure times .1sec and .4 seconds, stacked in registax without the black screen and then opened in photoshop and saved as jpeg files.
10 images at .4 sec exposure
http://www.precons.com/iis/gallery/I...5-m8-10x.4.jpg
and 20 images at .1 sec exposure
http://www.precons.com/iis/gallery/I...-m8-20x.1s.jpg
Registax handled hot pixels ok, but black screen took out pixels, but wrecked the image. I need to practise a bit more on registax!
Here are the links to the zipped up m8 bitmaps, if anyone would like to have a go at stacking.
http://www.precons.com/iis/gallery/Images/m8-20x.1.zip (12mb)
http://www.precons.com/iis/gallery/Images/m8-10x.4.zip (6mb)
At the end of the day, the adapter was very good, easy to use, flexible and as a good indication, after about 5 minutes i had forgotten all about it, as it simply worked as it should.
Now I just have to wait for eyepiece projection and another adapter to have a go head to head
At the moment, a very good buy for $69 plus freight.