I just built an astro camera tracker with bits costing around £10 and tried it out with my Canon SX230HS. It seemed to track very well and here is a shot of Orion made up of 35 exposures of 150 seconds stacked together in DSS and processed in StarTools.
Another shot taken with my £95 SX530HS. Software = CHDK, Astrokam, ASPS, PHD2, DSS, StarTools and Paint.Net.
I am a member of the Powershotters group who asked for some details on how I processed this image. Here is a light image:
and here is a dark image
The 48 light and 15 dark images were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker along with 25 flats and 15 offsets to produce the FITS image below. This was then processed in StarTools to give the final result above.
Here is a shot I took with my SX530HS PowerShot at maximum optical zoom. Captured in CHDK AstroKam, guided by PHD2, stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in StarTools and Paint.NET.
Not bad for a second hand camera with no telescope?
Took these using my Canon SX530HS controlled by AstroKam. Other software used: CHDK, PHD2, ASPS, DSS and StarTools.
I left AstroKam running overnight with my SX530HS recently and it worked great. I had set up an 8 target observing list in Cartes du Ciel and imported it into AstroKam with 60 minutes per target and 300 seconds per exposure. Darks and biases were set at 1 per 5 lights.
AstroKam automatically controlled PHD2 autoguiding and plate solved each target using All Sky Plate Solver to provide spot on aiming.
The next morning I used the sort module to remove any duff shots and satellite trails and then generate Deep Sky Stacker project files. These were then batch processed in DSS and processed in StarTools. Final touchup in Paint.Net and I got the results below.
These were all shot at 25x zoom so I can still zoom in to 50x for more detail.
Here is my first attempt at deep sky with my new (second-hand) Canon SX530HS compact camera. I shot this with a beta version of AstroKam that I hope to release soon. I only used about a third of the optical zoom range so there is plenty of scope (pun) to chase smaller targets.
Still messing with settings for it but I think it compares well with a similar shot I took with my Canon 1100D below.
Here are the first results from my upcoming SpeedCam app which turns any camera capable of shooting video into a radar speed gun. The graph below is a summary of traffic speed in my street over a 7 hour period. SpeedCam also saves a picture of each vehicle with its speed printed.
Dave Lochhaas kindly gave me permission to show his first published video using Dave’s Motion Stacker. Great to see how they trace out rollercoaster tracks in the sky.
This is a first test of my latest software. It allows you to scan multiple videos and only select scenes with action. Great for subjects like bird feeders above.
This was taken with my Coronado PST solar scope from Inverness, Scotland over 8 hours of sunshine. It repeats a couple of times at different speeds so you can watch the action.