Quickly realizing the folly of trying to hold a camera over the EP, I found that Harry Siebert makes a nice contraption to mount any type of camera solid enough over the EP to take picturs. Using his device which can be seen here . I was able to take the following pictures:
12-22-01 pictures
The final step (to date), was to purchase a firewire webcam, and convert it to do CCD imaging of objects at the telescope's prime focus. The remaining pictutes, and pictures going forward, will use this technique, unless otherwise noted.
Many of these pictures also use "astrostack". This program takes movies as captured in AVI format from the webcam, breaks them into bitmaps, and then combines the images together after centering them. There are different ways of combining these images, average, median, etc, and you can really get a clear picture.
The pictures are native in AVI and BMP formats. I have converted some to JPEG format, which does good compression. This allows the pictures to load quickly, and also to be displayed on most web browsers.
12-23-01 pictures
12-25-01 pictures
12-29-01 pictures
1-1-02 pictures
1-3-02 pictures
Feb 10, 2002 --
Here are tonight's images - 2-10-02 Jupiter and Saturn pics again. I am still trying to master Astrostack. I also picked up Iris, and K3CCDTools, but after playing around a bit with all of them, for stacking and aligning, I was able to get the best results with Astrostack. I will try the others again later.
Feb 13, 2002-- Here is another attempt at using some of the footage from the 10th to try to get a better picture. This one is using K3CCDtools in a method proposed by Rick from the ASO. It is looking good. Thanks Rick! click here!
5-15-03 --
Managed to snap some pics of the lunar eclipse tonight. Find them right here.