Stars and Webcams

Webcams are a good cheap tool for looking at planets and the moon but recently I decided that I wanted to see if they could also be used on stars in the hope that I might be able to try and take the odd double star image in addition to sketching them. I decided to start with a nice bright single star to image first by picking Betelgeuse before moving onto a double star which was Almach. I have highlighted the locations of those two stars in the image below.

So as said above I decided to look at Betelgeuse which has a variable magnitude of 0.3 - 1.2 so is reasonably bright and easy to find. In addition it is a red giant so I was hoping I would pick up some nice colour.

As you can see above, I did pick up some nice orange colouring but it isn't the most exciting of images and I can see why people don't normally spend time just targeting individual stars.

I think double stars are different and Almach is a lovely double star with a nice yellow primary component and a tiny blue secondary component so I was hoping this would be a bit more interesting to see.

Yes, this was much more interesting to see and I love how you can see the blue colour of the secondary although I had to over expose the yellow on the primary to enable the webcam to pick up the dimmer companion. In the future it may be possible for me to take two images at different exposures and merge the images together to stop me over exposing the brighter components.

Overall, this has proved that I can at least image doubles in some manner and I may try and look at a few others in the future after I have at least done initial sketches.