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COLOR QUICKCAM
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THE COLOR QUICKCAM CAMERA FROM CONNECTIX
The QUICKCAM is a little CCD color camera manufactured by Connectix. You can perform photos and videos up to 640 by 480 either in million of color or in B&W.
The main use as webcam could becomes an astrocam, after a few modifications...
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The first operation, is to open carefully the camera, to be able to extract the electronic card and of course the CCD (Take care of the static discharge!)
You get like that, two electronic cards:
And the CCD:
Now you have only to convert all that in a nice astrocam. On my mind, an electrical junction box, a film roll and one part of an isolating tube for pipes will fit to it perfectly:
Here is the final result, a rustic but functional camera:
The first adjustment were more focused on the CCD line up and concentricity adjustment.
At the first attempt, the photos were really blurred, fuzzy, after an accurate adjustment (on the concentricity at least), the result was definitely improved. Some test on the moon, step by step, touching and compressing on the foam around the CCD, fixed the main sharpness problem.
Another problem occurs, some noise appears with a long shutter opening time (greater than 5 s). These is normal, due to the internal design of the CCD, the only way to fix it, is to reduce the temperature, for instance with a PELTIER probe. (Further test will be done, and explain on this page)
Example of M42 with and without cooling (including with the noise, blooming and sharpness!)
Here, you can enjoy the first Saturn photos, before and after sharpness tuning, the first result was not so great, but it was only the beginning...
Before and after CCD adjustment:
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The last photo is in real one from the set took the same night, and improvement by software, sharpness, brightness, contrast and also color correction. Even with bad photos, you can get a great one!
I just improved (again!) the camera, and wait only a very bright night to check the result.
To be continued...
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The uses of this camera as an astrocam is enough for planetary, solar and moon, it does not need a cooling, however for galaxy and others, cooling becomes the only choice!
My next modifications will be a cooling system by peltier module (another chapter on Astrobel site)
I use also a flip-mirror to align with a maximum accuracy what I want, especially when you know that the CCD size is only a few millimeters squared...
