I forgot to mention my chat with Gert, another telescope making regular up at the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. He’s a skilled astrophotographer and all around interesting guy, and has embarked on a campaign to do some high quality imaging of Jupiter. You can see some of his results here. Pretty nifty stuff. I copied (without permission, hope that’s okay Gert) one of his nicer images below as a tease, but you should surf over to his website for many more awesome results.
He also suggested that this $300 webcam was especially well suited for astronomical images. Given his great results, I think I should pay attention to his recommendations.
Perhaps some time in the future I’ll get to doing some of this video/webcam astronomy.
Walking down the street the other day, on the curb I spotted a telescope. Meade. 114mm mirror, f8.8 short tube. Took it home with me. Roadkill telescope (not as cool as your homebrew, but OK!)
Hey, resurrecting roadkill telescopes is a pretty noble endeavor, kind of like adopting stray cats and giving them a good home!