Advice on imaging faint objects please

Hi

I seem to be gradually getting the idea with planetary imaging - thanks for recent advice on this! I'm wondering if I can use my unmodified Toucam Pro to catch faint deep space objects. The guiding on my mount is not accurate enough at present to retain the on screen image seen through a 2x Barlow for more than a couple of minutes so long exposures are out. Using Registax 3 I've noticed a slight boost to planetary avi's. Would this or any other software be effective in adding stacks of short exposure Toucam images?

The other approach I wondered about was using software to 'lock on' to the chosen image on screen to give a longer exposure time.

I expect my question displays my ignorance pretty well! All help/ideas welcome.

Thanks

Tim

You won't get very far using the toucam for faint fuzzies. However, you can get started with dso imaging inexpensively with webcam modified for long exposure, such as the SAC cameras. You can pick up a SAC7 for a few hundred dollars - it is easy to use because it has a video mode that facilitates focusing and then a long exposure mode for imaging faint objects.

You could also use some of the low light level b&w video cameras - like the Mallencam or the Stellacam.

To track the object of interest you need a star tracker. There are several ways to do this, but I don't think any of them are what I would call simple. I think Ron Wodaskis book is absolutely necessary if you are going to think about dso imaging much less tracking.

Be glad to hear what more experience dso imagers have to say about this.

Michael

Take a look at what JimThoomes is doing with a Webcam.

http://jthommes.com/

As for the tracking issue, why don't you just try manual guiding to see if you can get anything stable enough with your setup?

Alex