The moon through a Lego webcam

Magnified view of a portion of the surface of the moon. Maria are visible along with a row of large craters along the terminator.

I’ve been wanting to try prime-focus imaging, but don’t have the equipment. But I did have a Lego webcam from 2000 sitting around. So I took out the sensor and put it in the tube from a bad Barlow lens and tried it out. I was pretty impressed with the results! I had to use an old laptop with 32-bit XP on it, had no way to control the exposure, and it exported to a video format modern systems don’t like, but when I got things working it looked beautiful!

Magnified view of a portion of the surface of the moon. Maria are visible along with a row of large craters along the terminator.

Being able to sit back in my chair and just watch the moon drift by was an incredible experience. I love visual observing, but I can see myself doing a lot of electronic observing in the future. As you can see the air was wavy and there were clouds, but this was a great test of the setup.

I pointed it at Jupiter too, and it resolved nice and sharp, but the camera has autoexposure baked into the firmware so I couldn’t tease out any surface detail. So I spent most of my time looking at the moon.

Zoomed image of the moon's surface, with Mare Fecunditatis, Mare Nectaris, Langrenus, Vendelinus, Petavius, Snellius, Stevenus, Funerius, and Fraunhofer marked up

Here’s a rough estimate of what was in frame at the time.


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