I know there are a few Astronomy folks around here, so I thought I'd share some of my first image attempts of the moon.
As most of you know I have a Celestron CPC1100 scope that I purchased about a year ago. You may also not be aware, but Webcam AstroPhotography is the cheapest and easiest way to get started. Down the road, you can purchase more expensive CCD based cameras for deep space stuff.
Anyway, I found a cheap Logitech Quickcam on craigslist, modified it by removing the lens, super glued a 35mm film case to it which fits right into the focuser, and bingo, my 11" scope just became one big a$$ lens.
I won't get into a lot of details on the capturing/processing, but basically you capture an AVI file, adjust the exposure, frames per second, gain, etc., then use another program to break up the AVI into seperate images, remove the garbage, then stack what you have left into the final image.
For my first attempt, I limited my captures to about 40seconds, which is like a 500mb AVI file. To really get better results I need to increase that time, especially for planets which you use 3-4 minutes.
Anyway, here are my first pics ever of portions of the moon.
