I've known for quite some time that you can get some quite nice images from a CCD attached to a hobby telescope. I wondered about using a webcam to do it. Apparently, I'm not the first.

I took some still shots with my ancient webcam. It had been so long since I even used it, that I forgot the res isn't high by default. So my first attempt was 2 very low res stills. I alligned the scope on 'a star' and took the two stills. Then I stacked them up by hand in setting alpha values for the layers, and combined the image in to this png

This was the result of my very first attempt

Tonight, I upped the resoluction, and captured some AVI files to see what I could see. Again, I just pointed the scope and 'a star' and captured 10 and 15 second AVIs. Then I found by accident a program called RegiStax. I've only played with this program for maybe 5 minutes, and I already have the following 2 images. It's fantastic. You just select the feature to track, and it follows it through the frames, then does all the stacking for you. Considering how little time I have spent on this, and noting that I did *no* setup before hand, I am surprised at the quality of the following 2 images.

The 'shine' is I belive to do with the fact that my scope was warm, inside, pointing through a window at an object not far from the warm roof of a neighbours house. Not exactly ideal viewing conditions