QC4000pro LX (SC2)
The QuickCam 4000 pro had to go
through a long exposure
modification following the
"SC2" approach as described by Martin Burri.
There is nothing much beyond Martin's remarks to be mentioned. The
modification went pretty straightforward. No pins are to be lifted in
this way of modifying, cutting PCB traces does the deal. I soldered
magnet wire (I have tons of this around for my radio projects) to the
pins of the ICs. The individual leads are connected to a kind of "patch
panel", the tiny bit of bread-board PCB glued to the camera opposite
the USB and microphone connector. Blue wires are making the final
connection to the 4011 hidden below the whole mess. The red and the
yellow wire (stereo phono cable) are serving as connection to the
parallel port of a computer. BTW, in contrary to the ToUCam, this camera holds an infrared cut filter inside the objective lens bearing, thus no additional IR-filter is needed in a setup like shown here.
 Camera front-side, no lens mounted. For reasons of experimentation, the camera is built in tilted... |
Additionally I spent money and
obtained a
Ra-motor for the EQ2. Decent tracking is a necessity for the long exposure times the
camera was modified for.
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LX-astro images
You are invited to compare with the images recorded using Bellow-Cam MK1 and Bellow-Cam MK2. Messier 44 gives some impression about the benefits of longer exposures. Exposure time was chosen to be 10s/frame. Conditions on March 13th 2004 when I was acquiring data for the following image were fair (for this site), with the unarmed eye, I could see Orion's sword.
M44, 50mm f/1.8
