toucam 810B

[ad602000]

Hi all,

Is the philips toucam 810b suitable for guiding or planetary imaging at all? If so, what would be a good price?

cheers
pete

[2stroke]

Maybe for planetary but not for guiding. Personaly i wouldn't bother and look for a quickcam 4000 pro ect on ebay if moneys tight. I can't find the full specs of it but a few googles says its not so crash hot :(

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/molyned/web-cameras.htm

This site has a list of alot of cams and there specs and if there useable for astro work.

[ad602000]

thanks very much for your advice

cheers
pete

[Regulus]

We have a Swann Platinum Series that is cylindrical. It fits into an old 35mm film canaster that we cut the bottom out of and that fits straight into the 1 1/4 eyepiece fitting.
It is a high res 5megapixel camera that can photograph up to 1280x1024. Haven't taken photos with it as yet but have seen excellent images on the laptop screen through it, so am looking forward to taking some soon.
It was $39.00

[BlackWidow]

Webcams lke the philips toucams or SPC900nc can work fine as guidecams, but they need to be the ones that have had the long exposure mod done to them. This allows them to see the fainter stars.



Regards
Mardy

[mswhin63]

Hi Mardy, That is not technically true, I currently use a regular webcam but PHD guiding software allows the addition of frames and dark frame to allow for a simple webcam to pick-up some decent stars. Recently I managed to get some really faint stars with 3.0sec software exposure and taking darks frame to cancel out noise. Although I don't think it ill work for some exceptionally dark area with faint stars it does work in the most surprising areas.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/109920401953767744541/albums/5696600960667427185 - is my set-up