Phillips 900NC arrived today

[prova]

So the 900NC and adapter turned up today, I have downloaded the trial of K3CCD and would like to know what settings I should be using to image Jupiter and Saturn as I have never imaged with a webcam or that software before?

Any help is appreciated to get me started.

[Matty P (Matt)]

Congrats and what timing, it looks great outside ATM. Jupiter is at opposition tonight as well.

The only advice I can give you is that try to use a slower frame rate with the 900NC, say 5 or 10 fps meaning less compression.

Good luck.

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Where did you get it from? I've been looking for one but msy don't seem to have any.

In terms of settings I'm no expert but did buy a good book on the subject. From what I've read, don't go too hard on the gain - gain=grain. Aim for mid range on gain slider. Leave brightness at default (mid range from memory) Adjust exposure and gamma if necessary. I use auto white balance.

Good luck.
Peter

[AlexN]

Peter - They are available from www.telescopes-astronomy.com.au - Matthew is great to deal with and he also sells the 1.25" adapters/filters etc that you would want/need for autoguiding....

Congrats on the purchase Prova.

I use the settings as follows...

10-15fps (rarely more, sometimes 5 if seeing is steady enough)
gain - 1/4 way across the slider
brightness - test on the night, some nights it needs more than others.
gamma - quarter to half way depending on the night.
Shutter speed, 5,6 notches up the slider.
Saturation - MAXIMUM!!

I cant recall any more settings at the moment, Im at work but if I think of any more I'll reply back...

[Adsyadsman (Adam)]

Hi all,

Congrats on finding ur 900nc. Yes they are starting to become rare.
I just bought my 2nd unit on eBay from a store in the U.S. for $60au delivered .
If your feeling game, have some good technical nouse (or know a mate that does) this link is a great place to start on modding ur 900nc for getting more out of it.
http://home.zonnet.nl/m.m.j.meijer/D_I_Y/spc900nc.htm

My first 900nc I modded to a SC2 and works great, but sold it, so here I go again.

Looks like this type of low cost cam is a dying breed, as most of the newer webcams coming out now are kitted up with cheaper, smaller cmos chips (including the new TouCam units). So if you have a 900nc, hang onto it...for now... the up coming cmos chips will be better very soon

[prova]

Thanks for the tips .. 900NC cost me AUD71 delivered from the UK believe it or not and the adapter cost me AUD21 from the US (both eBay)..

I'll post my results when I have crack!

[AlexN]

mate, its worth having a crack now if your weather permits it... Jupiter is at opposition tonight.. Best night for it!

What scope wil you be using? the vixen 115s?

[prova]

Just didn't have the chance to make it out

Yeah will give it a go with the Vixen, I know the actual size will be small but hoping for some detail .. just waiting for my Powermate to arrive too

Originally Posted by AlexN

mate, its worth having a crack now if your weather permits it... Jupiter is at opposition tonight.. Best night for it!

What scope wil you be using? the vixen 115s?

[pneuman (Leigh)]

I picked up a 900NC at MSY Clayton last week, and I think they had one left after the one I grabbed, so that might be worth a look if anyone in Melbourne is after one. I bought an adapter off eBay and it arrived today, so with any luck I'll be out there tonight!

Has anyone used their camera under Linux? If so, what software did you use? I'll probably just use MEncoder, which is happy to record video to disk from the webcam, so hopefully that'll do a good enough job, though I'll have to investigate how to tweak all the camera settings.

[AlexN]

You also may want to find out what format it saves the video as... if it saves as MPEG it will suffer from alot of post-capture compression, where as AVI will usually be uncompressed..

I had this problem when I started using my 900NC, I was using the phillips capture program.. and all of the videos were saved as MPEG...

It severely degrades final image quality.

[pneuman (Leigh)]

I found a great app for Linux and Windows to do the capturing called wxAstroCapture:

http://arnholm.org/astro/software/wxAstroCapture/

I tried MEncoder at first, but it's a bit too generic, so it didn't have controls for the shutter speed, etc. wxAstroCapture did a great job, though. I also found ImageJ, a medical image application that can register (with the StackReg plugin) and stack the images. To export the videos from wxAstroCapture as images to import in to ImageJ, I used transcode.