Webcam with exposure longer than 1s?

[Miesilmannimea]

Hi

I'm currently having fun trying to record images of the night sky using cheap equipment, not necessarily intended for this purpose Currently, it is a camera used in surveillance, which has the longest exposure of 1 s and the ability to adjust the gain. The effects are promising (taking into account the class of the equipment ), such as the photo below...



I would also like to try using a webcam to take photos. I had a Logitech C270 and I know that the longest exposure is 1s. I took photos of the moon using it (mounted without its own lens in the Newton telescope) and the effects were very nice, especially considering that the camera currently costs pennies...

But to the point.
I'm looking for a cheap USB camera (webcam type, not astro like ASI ) that, working with Sharpcap, could record an image with an exposure longer than 1 second. Unfortunately, this information is not provided in the descriptions of such cameras... Logitech C600 maybe?

Do you know such a camera? If so, please provide the model
Thank you in advance!

Jakub

[turfpit]

Jakub

I achieved these lunar mosaics with a Sweex webcam viewtopic.php?t=736&hilit=sweex. I took out the front lens, added webcam adapter (eBay) and an IR filter. The 10-panel mosaic came out well given the cost of the hardware.

I also adapted a Microsoft Lifecam (which can expose up to 2000ms) by building it into a cheap eyepiece casing and adding an IR filter. Details here https://garyhonislegacy.com/lifecam/lifecam1.html . I have seen these today on eBay in the £15 - £25 cost range. IR filters can be picked up for around £15. I think the images from thai camera got lost in a disk tidy but the camera did work for lunar.

Both of these are recognised under SharpCap 4.1, both 32 & 64-bit versions. The Lifecam gives a resultion up to 1280x720, the Sweex is 640x480.

I did get lured into buying dedicated astro imaging cameras viewtopic.php?t=3735&hilit=sweex

Dave

Sweex.JPG (100.09 KiB) Viewed 1412 times

Microsoft_Lifecam.JPG (52.89 KiB) Viewed 1412 times

[Miesilmannimea]

Thank you

Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD with 2s exposure looks promising. I will hunt for a suitably cheap one

Jakub

[admin]

Hi,

I'm not 100% convinced about the long exposures on the Microsoft webcams... Although the cameras will let you set the exposure manually up to some reasonable levels (my current Lifecam Studio accepts up to 1s exposure), the camera still updates the image much more rapidly than once per second. My guess is that the camera prioritizes the frame rate over the exposure, so if you have the camera set at 30fps, it will never actually use an exposure beyond 33ms.

cheers,

Robin

[Miesilmannimea]

Hi

I received a shipment of Microsoft Lifecam bought for €6 Unfortunately the histograms of the photos taken with 0.5, 1 and 2s exposure are the same. So it looks like the camera is taking shorter exposures and cheating
So I won't redo the camera, it will be useful for something else as is.... I will check what sensitivity it has - maybe for catching meteorites it will be ok.

M.

[Miesilmannimea]

If there are no webcams with exposures longer than 1s, could you recommend a webcam that works stably with SharpCap and has an exposure time of 1s?
I know about the C270 but it doesn't quite work with SC (the exposure length setting works badly).

M.

[admin]

Hi,

to be honest, I think that all consumer webcams are probably going to limit you to about 1/16s exposure, as they are designed for live video imaging rather than longer exposures.

The closest I can suggest is to look at 'board cameras' - not a consumer grade webcam, but from the PC point of view they work the same. I have a 'USB130W01MT' board camera that I bought some time ago... It functions as a webcam, goes up to 1280x960 resolution and an exposure of up to 0.5s (true exposure times). The sensor used is the Aptina AR0130M, which has been used successfully in many astronomy guide cameras - noisier and less sensitive than the modern alternatives, but cheap nowadays.

See - for example - https://www.amazon.co.uk/ELP-camera-meg ... 7O9CQ?th=1

cheers,

Robin

[Miesilmannimea]

Thank you