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I recently built a home made CCD video camera based on the Panasonic GP-CX171 board camera. The chip is a ¼" format interline transfer CCD that outputs color video at 480 horizontal TV lines of resolution and is great for Lunar and Planetary imaging. I designed the camera body to be no larger than an eyepiece and machined the nose to fit a standard 1 ¼" eyepiece holder.
It's great for Star Parties where you can use a TV or video projector to provide a large group of people with a view through the telescope without them having to wait in line for a turn at the eyepiece. I used this method to project a 4 foot diameter image of the moon during the October 27th Total Lunar Eclipse for the Southern Cayuga Central School Observatory located in Poplar Ridge, NY. Click on the thumbnail below to see the setup with the camera attached to a 210mm telephoto lens riding piggy back on a C-8. It was a lot of fun and a real crowd pleaser!
High resolution still images can be obtained from a digital video recording. Software can identify and isolate 10% of the sharpest frames to freeze out the effects of atmospheric turbulance. By averaging these frames together video noise is greatly reduced and the result can be processed using wavelet transform functions to produce surprisingly high resolution images of the moon and planets.
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