Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Last evening, my friend Tim Miller and I went to our telescoping spot and set up our Meade LX200 12-incher for the first time in a few years. After initial alignment, I plugged my PowerBook into the scope and used Starry Night Pro to point it to a series of objects nether of us had seen in some time. One of those was the planet Saturn, and as we looked, I got an idea. I reached into my bag and pulled out my iSight camera, hoping that just by chance it would fit into one of our eyepiece adapters so that we could get some pictures.

Well, it didn’t. The adapters are 1-1/4″ in diameter, and the iSight is 1-3/8″ in diameter. But we still had a chance of getting some pictures by using the afocal method, where we hold the camera up to an eyepiece. The tricky thing about taking afocal pictures by hand is, the camera has to be at the right orientation so that the light coming from the eyepiece strikes the iSight’s lens at a perpendicular angle. We were able to catch several clips of Saturn using iMovie, the best of which I have posted here, at “Revenge of the Giant Head”. Saturn is off-center because, again, aligning the eyepiece and the camera by hand is very difficult. It jitters a bit also because it’s hard for a person to hold the camera perfectly still, and the movements in your hand are amplified by the narrow field of view and the small object being recorded. Had Tim and I been able to hold the camera perfectly still, the iSight would have been able to properly focus the image. You can still tell it’s Saturn, it’s just not a sharp Saturn.

Our next step is to build an adapter. Tim has the tools and some aluminum, and sometime this week he’s going to create a piece that we can slide the iSight into so it will be held still and correctly aligned with the eyepiece of our choice. When that adapter gets built, I’ll post some pictures of it here, along with the cool iSight movies we’ll make. The crescent moon is coming up soon!