I made up a Diffraction Spike maker thingo to see if I could put Diffraction Spikes on my pics.
Anything to distract from those big blobby stars that webcams create.
I started with the old fishing line trick, but that didn't show up.
Then I tried 5mm wide cardboard stips. They only just faintly showed up on the brightest stars. So I tried 12mm cardboard stips.
Yep, works (sort of), but because the wider strips took up so much of the apature, I had to take much longer exposures. For example, the Carina image usually takes 180 seconds. This one took 300 seconds to get the same image.
One interesting thing I noticed during this experiment was that Orange stars diffract easily, whereas white ones are a let-down!!!!!
Oh well, I had fun mucking about
1. the Diffraction Spike maker thingo I made.
2. Carina with diffraction spikes
3. Antares with diffraction spikes
4. Jewel Box with diffraction spikes
5. Gacrux with diffraction spikes.