SharpCap Forums

Venus from last night... Philips SPC900 webcam with 3X barlow on Skywatcher 150P (EQ3-2)
Captures using SharpCap 2.9.3011
Camera settings:
[Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera]
Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=640x480
FPS=60.00
Colour Space=YUY2
Exposure=3.9ms
Brightness=64
Contrast=32
Saturation=0
Gamma=0
Colour Enable=255
Backlight Compensation=0
Gain=13

Best 60% of 1000 frames stacked in Registax with small red/blue alignment corrections.

Venus 18th February 2017 by jonnostringer, on Flickr

Good image Jonno and it's nice to see that there's still a place for the good old fashioned SPC900 these days!

Speaking of the SPC900 - it's a bit of a weird camera to work with because it is only USB1.1 - that means it has to do compression on each captured frame on the camera chip itself to even have a chance of transferring multiple frames per second to the PC over the limited bandwidth of the USB link. The upshot of this is that it can have compression artifacts in the images and they can get worse as you turn up the FPS of the camera because it needs to compress *more* when you try to use it at 60fps than it does at 10fps. Anyway, when you have a lot of detail in your image (ie lunar) it's a good idea to set a slow FPS to minimize these problems.

cheers,

Robin

Thanks for the tip Robin. I will bear that in mind next time I'm shooting something more detailed.

I've also got an LX modded SPC880 which also had its CCD changed for a monochrome chip. I've used it for comets,globular clusters and M42/M31 with reasonable success.

Maybe one day I'll buy a proper astro cam