Monday, August 10, 2009

More Scopin' Fun

I've continued to play with the Galileoscope over the weekend. I will say this again, it has been the best $15 I've spent in my life. While I will certainly be looking for a high end 'scope when I can afford it, the Galileoscope does what a good intro telescope should. At both 25x and 50x, you can aim at any dark spot in the sky and see dozens of stars that were not visible with the naked eye. You can clearly see the 4 largest Jovian moons, and I was even able to make out the main cloud bands on Jupiter.

I've made -some- progress on the video capture front. I've given up on using my hand-held digital camera and have decided to try to mount a webcam to the eyepiece (ala Thunderf00t, a man who clearly knows his astronomy.) I was having troubles getting my external webcam to work with my Macbook, but blogger Sidiasus stepped up to the plate and suggested using a memory-stick based Ubuntu Linux distribution. This works great, and has the additional benefit of command-line control over the webcam image. I'll try to test this sometime this week. In the end, the case may be that I will need better equipment to capture some of the images I've witnessed over the past several weeks.

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