Sweex Viewplus WC070 webcam
Remounted WC070 webcams
The camera on the left is mounted in a project box and that on the right is in its original case with a C/CS ring glued to the front of the case.
AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture 1000 tiff files at 1600 x 1200 resolution with real-time flatfield correction, using flatfield captured earlier, on a laptop running Debian Linux with the XFCE desktop environment. The capture was set to mapping YUYV to greyscale to avoid the chrominance, pixel vignetting problems with this camera. The images were registered and stacked in Autostakkert! 3 running in wine and the resulting stacked image was wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 also running in Wine. The final image was processed and re-scaled in the Gimp 2.9.
Clicking on an image will give a closer view.
Screenshot showing AstroDMx Capture for Linux capturing data. Note the histogram showing details of the exposure
Animation of alternation between applying realtime flatfield application and not applying it
Chrominance problems with the pixel vignetting make it more difficult to correct if YUYV mode is used. However, mapping YUYV to greyscale is prefectly satisfactory for lunar imaging.
Images produced by the above system
As long as flatfield correction is used, this low cost webcam produces images with very little compression, and is a good starter lunar imaging camera. At the time of writing, the WC070 camera can be purchased on Amazon for about GBP 15. More experiments will be done at a later date using the camera as a planetary imager.
