Thursday, 16 February 2012

Webcam Moon Mosaic with Xbox Live Vision

A couple of weeks ago I took a series of photographs of the moon using my telescope and the Xbox Live Vision webcam to turn into a mosaic. It took me a while to composite them together, but I managed to do this using some free open source software called Hugin.

Moon Mosaic, 4 Feburary 2011

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

WebCam capture with Python on Mac OS X

I typically program in Python, and in the absence of any open source astrophotography software for webcam image capture that will run under the current Mac OS X, perhaps I can write something myself. So - how can you capture web camera photos from Python? One way is using OpenCV (originally Intel’s Open Source Computer Vision library). Another popular library is VideoCapture, but it is Windows only.