2006-05-07

Why have a 'scope when you can Skype?

On Friday night (actually Saturday morning by the time it happened), not long after posting my silly Moon images, I got an instant message via Skype from Kaustav to say that he'd got his 'scope set up, with webcam, and that it was pointing at Jupiter and did I want to try a little experiment? The experiment was to see how it would look if we started a video chat. So, we connected a voice call, fired up the video connection and this was the result:


Okay, not the best view of Jupiter — pretty terrible really, but I was impressed that it worked at all. Also, given that Jupiter is so low in the sky from here meaning that I can't see it from my observing location in my garden, that's the best view of the planet I've had so far this apparition.

File Under: Skype, VoIP, Webcam, Jupiter.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what scope size he has -- mine is 90mm -- but that's a pretty average webcam image of Jupiter for a similar scope. Single frames of my Jupiter movies look like that (or worse) before stacking and processing.

Anonymous said...

Hi Rob,
You're not far off. The image was taken through my Meade ETX105. Seeing was particularly bad that night but I managed to capture a few AVIs and process them later. You can see them at:

http://kaustav.uk.com/photos/astronomy/jupiter/06-05-2006/montage.jpg

Anonymous said...

AH... I have an ETX90 and live in a sub-tropical urban environment. So my seeing is pretty poor most of the time. :P

Nice shots on your page.