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!

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.

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