Long ago, I talked about using an Apple iSight camera to take pictures through a telescope. I promised some pictures and a sort of how-to. And then I told everyone to wait. And wait some more. And then, finally, Tim and I actually found an evening with clear weather where we could get away from the city and test out the camera and take some pictures, so I could write about the experience. Just as I was about to write everything down, I became seriously ill, so I was out of action for a week or so. But now… now I’m going to write about it! After months of waiting, you’re finally going to have the opportunity to read the most semi-climactic of all possible outcomes in this mildly interesting project.
The goal, for those of you who can’t remember that far back, was to couple an iSight camera to our telescope and see what happened. We tried a preliminary run and got a video of Saturn, which I was able to make into a semi-decent still image. The fly in all of this ointment was that the camera had to be held still to get a decent picture, and neither Tim nor I (or probably any person for that matter) can hold it steady enough. So we decided to build a mount.
Mounting the iSight to an eyepiece is simpler than you might think, assuming you have the kinds of eyepieces we do. I took some pictures because describing the mount without the pictures would probably be pointless.
The parts:
Clockwise from the top left, the black thing is our 8mm eyepiece with the rubber eye cup removed, exposing a convenient indented edge which nylon screws can grip. Next to that is the iSight camera. Below the camera is the inner aluminum cylinder which houses the iSight, with nylon screws to hold the camera steady. The other aluminum cylinder goes on the outside of the first, as you’ll see shortly in another shot. Tim machined both of these cylinders and the screw holes to fit both the iSight and the eyepiece. Finally, there’s a rubber ring to prevent the iSight from slipping into the barrel, again, illustrated in pictures just below.
Here’s a step-by-step illustration of how these parts fit together:
And here’s the finished product mounted on the scope:
And the scope, plugged into my PowerBook, running Starry Night Pro, ready for action:
The mount worked very well. The camera was held as still as we could expect. The problem we ran into was the software. To make a long explanation short, we needed to focus both the telescope and the camera, and after that, we had to adjust the camera’s settings so that details from Jupiter, made bright by the telescope’s 12-inch aperture, wouldn’t be washed out in the resulting image. The only software I could find that would allow me to control the iSight in that way was Quicktime Broadcaster, and frankly, it’s not great for astronomy. QTB is intended for what I assume most people would call normal shots, in a room, of maybe a person or a scene, not of tiny planets through a telescope. That being said and understood, QTB’s preview window is too small, and it’s hard to see whether the object you’re viewing, in this case, Jupiter, is in focus, and what level of detail is available. Also, the interface for controlling the camera’s settings is idiosyncratic and frustrating until you get the hang of it. The only way to tell if we were in focus was to take movie after movie, and then guess whether we should tweak it anymore or just leave it.
With some patience, Tim and I managed to get a decent movie of Jupiter, ready for processing by Keith’s Image Stacker into a sharp still:
It was a long way to go, and admittedly Tim and I were climbing a bit of a learning curve, but the iSight turns out to be fairly good for planetary imaging. If there were a better piece of software other than QTB available, the task probably would have been 1/2 as hard.
Having done about as well as we could with planets, we decided to turn the camera towards some relatively bright deep sky objects. M13 is a giant globular cluster that looks great to the eye, but didn’t even register on the iSight. M57, the Ring Nebula, didn’t show either. Neither of these no-shows is surprising - the iSight is intended to photograph humans in a lit room, not faint fuzzies of the night sky.
Our next target is the moon. It’s large and bright with a lot of little details and seems like it would be the perfect object for an iSight-equipped telescope.
Smile Tim!
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July 5th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
If you don’t mind spending a few bucks there are a few applications out there that would be way better for what you want to do then QTB. I can recommend BTV Pro, which I’ve used for years, though it looks like development has pretty much stopped on the app. In addition to allowing you full control over your iSight, it’s AppleScriptable, does stop-motion, image averaging and motion detection. Not bad for forty bucks:
http://www.bensoftware.com/
There are others as well, but I’ve only used BTV, and I like it a lot.
Cheers!
-systemsboy
July 5th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
You should look into iGlasses.. http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/
I don’t work for them I just use it often for video conferencing.
July 5th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
[...] Zainteresowanych zapraszam tutaj. [...]
July 5th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Ha! It’s about time to jump into development world guys
and if you’re lucky maybe you guys could end up like two guys at mekentosj.com
from zero to hero, get all the fame and received apple designer award
July 5th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Thanks for the software suggestions. I will certainly check those out to see if any of them do what we need. As for developing our own software, I can write some shell scripts and that’s about as far into writing code as I get.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:17 am
iGlasses is great, gives you a huge degree of control over
your iSight.
July 6th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Thanks for the great idea, I always wondered how I could get a digital image from my Celestron 9″. That quite a good way.
July 7th, 2006 at 4:58 am
[...] [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 9:22 am
a little remark:
iSight settings can be accessed via the system dialogue “Video Device Settings” which can be activated e.g. within Quartz Composer, maybe other applications, too. You have the tab “Adjustments” with sub-categories Color, Image and Mechanics. Among others, you can tweak color temperature/white balance, gain, shutter, exposure, edge enhancement, and auto/manual focus (with manual focus, the focus can be set between about 2cm distance and infinite.
July 7th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
[...] Posted by hector Filed in Uncategorized [...]
July 9th, 2006 at 6:25 am
In order to remove image noise –which I suspect will be very high with an isight, I’d warmly recommend the freeware application Lynkeos, http://lynkeos.sourceforge.net , that’ll very efficiently sort the most stable views and create an averaged image in just some clicks…
July 19th, 2006 at 10:17 am
In my opinion, it’s a good idea (of u have a mac)
http://vuelos-bajo-coste.es
August 20th, 2006 at 6:29 am
You could also try to use EvoCam ( http://www.evological.com/evocam.html ) That is a nice solution to do all kind of things with a webcam. You could trigger AppleScripts depending on sudden changes of the image. I did some automatic traffic-observation with an isight and evocam. I got very nice results.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:51 am
i want see some pictuer the sun….a white deware neutron star……….io…..europa ganymede ……callisto….jupiter…….. saturn …………….uranus ……………..neptune
November 14th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
how to make to get the rings necessary to assemble my iSight on my telescope? Thank you
November 14th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
To make the aluminum piece, you need some properly shaped aluminum scrap pieces, a lathe, and some accurate measurements of the scope and the iSight. Tim made those pieces, not I, so I don’t know any more detail than that. A friend who knows a little something about metal working could probably make those aluminum pieces pretty easily.
November 21st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Hello. Could you send measurements of your rings to me. Thank you
(Sorry for my English)
November 27th, 2006 at 6:49 am
That ws brilliant work isight for planetary Ima ging… can I do it with any high end digital camera… though to have such a powerful telescope will cost me a fortune….
February 14th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
For another app try
http://www.edhsw.com/mixscope/index.html
It’s for microscopy, but that’s not too far afield, is it?
April 21st, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Hi. I don’t see any updates, so I don’t know if you found any software.
I can second the recommendation of iGlasses. I used it to take video of my pet scorpion eating a goldfish, in regular light and UV (in which the scorpion glows). iGlasses gives you control over the focus, gain, sharpness, etc. I was very impressed with the Macro-like image quality I was able to obtain using iGlasses.
Also, it’s really cheap. Under $20. It just puts a menu item in one of the menus of most applications that use the camera. I used it with iMovie.
I just ordered my first telescope, a basic lil’ Astroscan from Edmund Scientific. I’m planning on rigging up my iSight to it, though I doubt I’ll be able to come up with something so professional. ;^)
April 22nd, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Oh, and I should add that iGlasses’ adjustments, including focus, are ‘live’, and take effect while you record.
By the way, did you paint the adapter tube black, or line it with black light-damping paper, or did you leave it in the natural state?
November 19th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Just experimenting with quartz composer and have some extra tips. (I know this thread is stale but I found it useful)
You get quartz composer with the OSX developer tools (big download but free if you register with apple). Once you have composer, start a new composition with three components: video input, rendering destination dimensions and billboard.
Connect the image out from video to the image input on billboard and the width output from rendering destination dimensions to width input on billboard. If it’s all worked, you should get a video image in the preview window.
Now, the important part. Select video input, click inspector and in the inspector window select “settings” from the drop down at the top. Click show device settings. Fiddle wit the settings here until you have it right - you can turn off auto focus, adjust brightness and gain, etc.
Once the image is looking right, go to the file menu, select “export as quicktime movie”. This is odd - it asks you for a duration and a size. Make the size 640 x 480 and set duration to 5 mins (depending on how many frames you want to grab).
Now, you’ll have a quicktime movie. This movie is strange - when you play it, you get a live feed from your camera. BUT, all of the video settings such as brightness, etc. are applied. So, click play and you’ll see the live feed coming through with your custom settings.
Although I couldn’t seem to save this video, I found that the iSight kept its settings, so if you create a new vidoe recording, it should start using your new defaults. I don’;t know how long this lasts - probably until you disconnect the iSight.