Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Hacks, How-tos, Apple
Mount an iSight on a telescope
Aaron Adams (yes the switcher) is both a Mac geek and an astronomy buff so it makes perfect sense that he would want to combine the two into an unholy amalgam of telescope and iSight.Ok, so it is a little more elegant than that. Aaron was nice enough to post directions and example shots that he took using this rig. It looks pretty sweet to me. Now if only I had a telescope and didn't live in the middle of Philadelphia.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Douglas F Shearer said 5:12PM on 7-05-2006
I can see the appeal in using this to make time-lapse videos of the sky, but I would suspect that the iSight is of too low a resolution to be truly useful.
It is slightly cheaper than the Nikon 20D (Different letter on the astronomy-specific model) DSLR though!
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Cody Dildy said 5:30PM on 7-05-2006
After reading it and viewing the results, there was really no point to use the iSight, unless of course you soley wanted an Apple product affixed to your telescope. Why not mount a DSLR camera to it; you would have full focusing capabilities and a great picture. But I love the craftmanship of the project and the use of an iSight. Good work guys!
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Aaron Adams said 9:58AM on 7-06-2006
You're both right that the iSight is really not the best choice for astrophotography, for a number of reasons. But how were we going to know that if we didn't try? ;) This was primarily an experiment to see what would happen, as opposed to a serious attempt to get high quality pictures. (There are dedicated CCD cameras specifically for astrophotography that would do a much better job.) I'd say we got a decent shot of Jupiter and Saturn both (see my page) with a camera people may already have, using a mount that's relatively simple to create and understand, but with a need for better software (which some people have already suggested).
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Cody Dildy said 1:15AM on 7-08-2006
You are very correct.
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