* Astronomy

Impressive Astronomy Photos Using a... Webcam?

Assuming you have connected the webcam to a computer and fired up the control software, you should see an image, perhaps an out-of-focus one, but an image all the same. Very slowly and carefully, bring the object into focus and record a video of the object. The longer the better, but try not to record for any longer than 30 seconds of footage -- any longer, and it will take you an age to process.
If you watch the video as its being captured, you might notice that sometimes the view is nice and sharp and other times a little blurred. That's because the atmosphere can knock the light around as it comes in through the atmosphere. The beauty is that the video is made up of hundreds of individual pictures so using a piece of software called Registax you can discard all the bad frames and use the good ones.
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Less than 15 seconds for Jupiter to cross my display

On the trail of the stars in the night sky in Leicestershire

While soaring daytime temperatures and clear skies had most people heading for deck chairs and beer gardens, it also produced the perfect conditions for astrophotography.
For the technically-minded, Mark Humpage used an Olympus E5 dslr camera with an 8mm fisheye lens. The lens' aperture was set wide open at F3.5 with a shutter speed of 15 seconds and triggered by a remote cable to shoot continuously from 8.30pm to 5.30am.
This provided 2000 separate images that were then run through "stacking" software, which in effect places the pictures on top of each other before flattening them to produce a single image.
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